The 185th Anniversary of the York Minster Fire of 1840

Posted on by

It’s the 185th anniversary of the fire at York Minster on 20th May, 1840 and here’s a print to mark the occasion!

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

This was York Minster’s second fire of the 19th Century – just 11 years after Jonathan Martin’s arson attack of 1829. This particular image was drawn and lithographed by W. Monkhouse of Lendal and published by H. Bellerby of Stonegate.

It is to be regretted that the mode in which the works about the minster are now done is anything but satisfactory. A correspondent, commenting on some particulars we gave recently of alterations in the organ, objects to much that has been done, in strong language; but, as we are not in a position to test at the moment the correctness of his assertions, we do not print them.
Taken from an 1859 compilation of The Builder magazine.

There was, apparently, some disagreements around the quality of the post-fire refurbishment, I should probably try and find out a little more about that…