An empty shop on one of York’s most significant historic sites looks set to be turned into a bar and café.
Cath Kidston at 32 Stonegate, which stands where gunpowder plotter Guy Fawkes is believed to have been born, will be turned into The Jaipur Tea Rooms if new plans are approved.
The shop has been empty for the past 19 months, since Cath Kidston announced early in the pandemic that it was closing all 60 of its UK shops.
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New planning applications have now been submitted to City of York Council.
In the paperwork, planning agents Collective Design, on behalf of the anonymous applicant, say: “32 Stonegate is proposed to become a new bar tea room development.
“It is ideally located in the centre of the city and its main shopping central business district. It has mixed use surrounding it with retail units and other bars and coffee/ tea rooms along Stonegate.”
Seven full-time and 14 part-time jobs will be created if the plan is approved, according to the application form.
Garden renovation
No structural alterations are planned to the front of the building, and the developer says the internal changes “do not affect the listed historical fabric of the building, which stays intact.”
Work will also be done to renovate the garden, which is currently overgrown.
The applicant says the building’s listed status make it difficult to be fully accessible for disabled customers, but say the ground floor and garden are accessible and will offer the same products and facilities as the upper floors, although an intercom will be needed for an access point at the back of the premises.
The Guy Fawkes Inn in High Petergate has often been advertised as being on the site of Fawkes’s birthplace, but the claim is not echoed by local history experts.
Detailed historical York records show that the plotter’s parents Edward Fawkes and Edith Jackson were living at the Stonegate address at the time of his birth in 1570, and there is a York Civic Trust plaque on the site today.
The house off Stonegate is long gone, and the current building was built in the early 1800s as a house, before becoming a shop.
It was altered and extended in the late 1800s, and then underwent further renovation in the late 1900s, when the current windows were installed.
The planning application can be seen on the City of York Council website. There are two simultaneous files, one for the full planning permission, which can be accessed here, and one for the listed building consent, which is here.