It’s Time to Rise and Face the Music.
That’s what went through my head when I saw The Crescent’s post asking people to object to the development next door. It wasn’t dramatic — just a very tired plea — another “are you having a laugh?” moment. We thought we’d settled this already. A small prompt that shouldn’t have needed saying — a venue trying not to get boxed in or strategically erased by another round of developmentopia.
And people responded. Residents, gig-goers, out-of-towners — all saying the same thing in different words: “not in my name.” It was one of those moments where you realise the city hasn’t gone quiet at all. People do care. They care that some things should stay the way they are because they matter.
Objection, Objection, Objection…
Most planning applications in York go up, go through, and nobody really expects to change the outcome. Like a lot of the UK, York has that feel of quiet resignation these days — not because people don’t care, but because the system has trained people into believing their input won’t change anything.
But this one has struck a chord. Another short-stay block. Another tall, anonymous box labelled “mixed-use” as if that makes it any less out of place. Another example of the small shifts that slowly alter a city until one day you realise somethings missing or “when did that go?”
This time though people didn’t shrug. They wrote.
From the responses on Facebook I sense they wrote lovingly in support, about the importance of the venue and tired of seeing the same defence by developers reappear. The objections are simply pointing out what everyone already knows: a building like this in that location would create a conflict that could very easily end with the venue paying the price. The point isn’t to “save” anything in a dramatic sense. It’s to stop a decision that clearly doesn’t make sense for anyone other than the investors behind it.
Victoria Vaults Wasn’t an Outlier
Victoria Vaults showed how quickly the story around a venue can change once redevelopment becomes the main character. As I understand the ACV is still in place, but the picture being built around it began to pull in another direction. The venue has been described as no longer viable, the figures in the planning documents leaned that way, and the building’s disrepair became part of the supporting evidence — arranged so it all points to the same conclusion: “maybe this isn’t worth saving.”
What stands out isn’t a bold claim, but the framing. The application presents the replacement as if it were a gift to the people of York: affordable housing, meeting local need, a better use for the site. Except it amounted to three homes — the kind of number that sounds meaningful in a paragraph but does nothing in real life. And in York, “affordable” often ends up meaning “affordable to a spreadsheet,” not the people working in the city. If history is anything to go by, those units won’t stay within reach for long. They tend to move quietly toward investment stock or, ironically, into the very short-term letting market being cited as a pressure York needs more housing to fix.
The strange thing is how the cultural value of the venue is made to feel optional. A place that had served a community for years reduced to a line about “sufficient provision elsewhere in the city,” as if losing another space was a tidy, low-impact decision. On paper with the aid of legalese, the case looks neat. In reality, it misses the point entirely: the pub didn’t fail its community — the version of it written in the planning documents did.
Victoria Vaults didn’t disappear because nobody cared. It disappeared because its story was rewritten to make the replacement look like an upgrade. It’s a pattern York has seen now repeatedly. And it sits squarely in the same conversation as The Crescent: different venue, same pressure, same messaging at work.
The Cultural Headliner
The Crescent occupies a particular place in York’s cultural landscape. It isn’t decorative heritage build. It isn’t a marketing asset. It isn’t pretending to be something. It’s one of the few venues in the city where things actually happen because people want them to, not because they’ve been programmed in to create footfall.
Places like this don’t survive on branding — they survive because local musicians, audiences, promoters and staff keep choosing to use them. They survive because people who live here understand what it means to have a venue that isn’t owned by a chain or curated for visitors. They survive because generations layer their memories through the same doorway.
York doesn’t have enough of these places left to risk losing one to a building designed without any understanding of what already exists around it. When a development arrives with the height, scale and short-term churn of this one, locals instinctively recognise the threat: not because they’re anti-development, but because they know exactly what happens when new-build accommodation sits shoulder-to-shoulder with a live venue.
It’s not subtle — Noise complaints. Restrictions. Edged-out programming. Gradual suffocation.
People don’t need a consultation to know how that story ends — York has seen this happen enough times already. So when the objection window opened, people acted.
Short-Term Let Thinking
Short-term ‘let’ thinking has become part of York’s operating system. And it goes far beyond property. It’s a mindset that treats the city as something to visit rather than something to invest in socially. A place to book rather than belong to. A backdrop to enjoy briefly, rather than a place you help shape over years.
It shows up in buildings designed for turnover (both in people and monetarily) rather than community. In planning language that presents disruption as “activation” and displacement as “vibrancy.” In the belief that York can be lively in the hours people want entertainment and then conveniently quiet the moment they want to sleep.
It’s visible in the imbalance between what the city promotes and what the city supports. A venue may help attract visitors, but the same visitor economy often creates the conditions that make it harder for that venue to survive. Short-term logic rarely considers long-term consequences.
A two-night stay has become more influential than a twenty-year resident.
That imbalance sits at the heart of The Crescent issue. A building designed around short-stay usage, placed next to a long-standing cultural space automatically creates friction. And the burden always falls on the part of the street that was there first.
When Culture Gets Treated as Noise
York promotes itself as a place of atmosphere, creativity and cultural life — but the more the centre of the city shifts toward short-term use, the more culture gets reframed as a disruption rather than a contribution.
Venues aren’t the problem. They behave exactly as venues should. The real issue is the increasing number of people who move into or book into “city living” developments without fully understanding what a city is. This contradiction comes up repeatedly: people buy into the “urban lifestyle,” then immediately want the city to behave like a hotel. They enjoy the energy and the options when friends visit, but expect silence on demand when it’s inconvenient to them. It’s an oxymoron built into the market. A venue becomes a selling point in the brochure and a complaint risk in reality.
None of this is about residents versus visitors — it’s about mismatched expectations created by developments that don’t take the existing life of streets seriously. If you build residential or short-stay accommodation next to a live venue, the conflict is already baked in.
New York City Blocks
One part of this shift is architectural. York has been growing a certain type of building — box-led, developer-forward, optimised for efficiency and turnover, not expression or belonging.
They’re not awful. They’re not remarkable either. They’re Minecraftian: minimal detail, minimal ambition, minimal connection to the place they’re in. You can see the sustainability credentials, but you can also see the lack of character. A token nod to York’s “vernacular style” glued somewhere onto the facade doesn’t change the fact that these blocks could have been dropped into any city in the country.
The problem isn’t the modernity. York can handle modernity and embrace Passiv Haus thinking. The problem is the anonymity. Too many of these buildings are designed without acknowledging what surrounds them — the cultural layers, the long-standing spaces, the actual rhythm of the street. They’re built for financial models rather than neighbourhoods. And when one of these arrives next to a venue with deep community roots, the clash becomes structural. One grows culture; the other suppresses it.
Who does York Serve?
On a recent trip to Chester I noticed these lines carved into two small statues set into a corner of a building:
THE KING HIMSELF IS SERVED BY THE FIELD.
THE PROFIT OF THE EARTH IS FOR ALL.
A clear reminder that if value is created from a place, the people who live in that place should benefit. It stuck with me because York has been sliding away from that principle. Too many developments extract value without feeding anything back. Too many decisions are shaped around investors over residents. Too much of what gets approved benefits people who won’t feel the outcome of the decision — only the return.
It also highlighted the same contradiction seen around The Crescent and Victoria Vaults: more people buying into “city living” without understanding what city living actually means. The Chester lines stayed with me because they spoke to something York keeps wrestling with: who gets the benefit, who takes the impact, and who gets to redefine the expectations of a street they’ve only just arrived on.
Common Census
An uprising of planning objections won’t rewrite York’s future. But hundreds arriving at once show that resignation isn’t the only mood left in the city. People aren’t shouting. They’re not organising campaigns. They’re not romanticising venues or talking about heritage in abstract terms. They are making a simple point:
This development doesn’t fit here and the consequences aren’t worth the risk!
It shows that residents are still paying attention, and they will step forward when something crosses a line that’s been inching closer for years. Cities don’t collapse because of one big decision. They change because of a series of small ones that go unchallenged. This challenge resonated.
When the Music Stops, Who’s Left Listening?
The objections don’t only defend a venue. They reveal a city that isn’t as silent as it’s often made to feel. When the music stops — or looks like it might — the people left without an outlet are the ones who were here before, will be here after, and understand that York’s cultural life depends on more than marketing. They experience the impacts and shifts everyday and believe the city should be shaped by those who live in it, not just those who pop by or extract from it from afar.
The York music industry asked locals and patrons to speak up. This time they did and I hope they get heard.
Local Community Culture Social Commentary Tourism
When the Music Stops, Who’s Left Listening?
It’s Time to Rise and Face the Music.
That’s what went through my head when I saw The Crescent’s post asking people to object to the development next door. It wasn’t dramatic — just a very tired plea — another “are you having a laugh?” moment. We thought we’d settled this already. A small prompt that shouldn’t have needed saying — a venue trying not to get boxed in or strategically erased by another round of developmentopia.
And people responded. Residents, gig-goers, out-of-towners — all saying the same thing in different words: “not in my name.” It was one of those moments where you realise the city hasn’t gone quiet at all. People do care. They care that some things should stay the way they are because they matter.
Objection, Objection, Objection…
Most planning applications in York go up, go through, and nobody really expects to change the outcome. Like a lot of the UK, York has that feel of quiet resignation these days — not because people don’t care, but because the system has trained people into believing their input won’t change anything.
But this one has struck a chord. Another short-stay block. Another tall, anonymous box labelled “mixed-use” as if that makes it any less out of place. Another example of the small shifts that slowly alter a city until one day you realise somethings missing or “when did that go?”
This time though people didn’t shrug. They wrote.
From the responses on Facebook I sense they wrote lovingly in support, about the importance of the venue and tired of seeing the same defence by developers reappear. The objections are simply pointing out what everyone already knows: a building like this in that location would create a conflict that could very easily end with the venue paying the price. The point isn’t to “save” anything in a dramatic sense. It’s to stop a decision that clearly doesn’t make sense for anyone other than the investors behind it.
Victoria Vaults Wasn’t an Outlier
Victoria Vaults showed how quickly the story around a venue can change once redevelopment becomes the main character. As I understand the ACV is still in place, but the picture being built around it began to pull in another direction. The venue has been described as no longer viable, the figures in the planning documents leaned that way, and the building’s disrepair became part of the supporting evidence — arranged so it all points to the same conclusion: “maybe this isn’t worth saving.”
What stands out isn’t a bold claim, but the framing. The application presents the replacement as if it were a gift to the people of York: affordable housing, meeting local need, a better use for the site. Except it amounted to three homes — the kind of number that sounds meaningful in a paragraph but does nothing in real life. And in York, “affordable” often ends up meaning “affordable to a spreadsheet,” not the people working in the city. If history is anything to go by, those units won’t stay within reach for long. They tend to move quietly toward investment stock or, ironically, into the very short-term letting market being cited as a pressure York needs more housing to fix.
The strange thing is how the cultural value of the venue is made to feel optional. A place that had served a community for years reduced to a line about “sufficient provision elsewhere in the city,” as if losing another space was a tidy, low-impact decision. On paper with the aid of legalese, the case looks neat. In reality, it misses the point entirely: the pub didn’t fail its community — the version of it written in the planning documents did.
Victoria Vaults didn’t disappear because nobody cared. It disappeared because its story was rewritten to make the replacement look like an upgrade. It’s a pattern York has seen now repeatedly. And it sits squarely in the same conversation as The Crescent: different venue, same pressure, same messaging at work.
The Cultural Headliner
The Crescent occupies a particular place in York’s cultural landscape. It isn’t decorative heritage build. It isn’t a marketing asset. It isn’t pretending to be something. It’s one of the few venues in the city where things actually happen because people want them to, not because they’ve been programmed in to create footfall.
Places like this don’t survive on branding — they survive because local musicians, audiences, promoters and staff keep choosing to use them. They survive because people who live here understand what it means to have a venue that isn’t owned by a chain or curated for visitors. They survive because generations layer their memories through the same doorway.
York doesn’t have enough of these places left to risk losing one to a building designed without any understanding of what already exists around it. When a development arrives with the height, scale and short-term churn of this one, locals instinctively recognise the threat: not because they’re anti-development, but because they know exactly what happens when new-build accommodation sits shoulder-to-shoulder with a live venue.
It’s not subtle — Noise complaints. Restrictions. Edged-out programming. Gradual suffocation.
People don’t need a consultation to know how that story ends — York has seen this happen enough times already. So when the objection window opened, people acted.
Short-Term Let Thinking
Short-term ‘let’ thinking has become part of York’s operating system. And it goes far beyond property. It’s a mindset that treats the city as something to visit rather than something to invest in socially. A place to book rather than belong to. A backdrop to enjoy briefly, rather than a place you help shape over years.
It shows up in buildings designed for turnover (both in people and monetarily) rather than community. In planning language that presents disruption as “activation” and displacement as “vibrancy.” In the belief that York can be lively in the hours people want entertainment and then conveniently quiet the moment they want to sleep.
It’s visible in the imbalance between what the city promotes and what the city supports. A venue may help attract visitors, but the same visitor economy often creates the conditions that make it harder for that venue to survive. Short-term logic rarely considers long-term consequences.
A two-night stay has become more influential than a twenty-year resident.
That imbalance sits at the heart of The Crescent issue. A building designed around short-stay usage, placed next to a long-standing cultural space automatically creates friction. And the burden always falls on the part of the street that was there first.
When Culture Gets Treated as Noise
York promotes itself as a place of atmosphere, creativity and cultural life — but the more the centre of the city shifts toward short-term use, the more culture gets reframed as a disruption rather than a contribution.
Venues aren’t the problem. They behave exactly as venues should. The real issue is the increasing number of people who move into or book into “city living” developments without fully understanding what a city is. This contradiction comes up repeatedly: people buy into the “urban lifestyle,” then immediately want the city to behave like a hotel. They enjoy the energy and the options when friends visit, but expect silence on demand when it’s inconvenient to them. It’s an oxymoron built into the market. A venue becomes a selling point in the brochure and a complaint risk in reality.
None of this is about residents versus visitors — it’s about mismatched expectations created by developments that don’t take the existing life of streets seriously. If you build residential or short-stay accommodation next to a live venue, the conflict is already baked in.
New York City Blocks
One part of this shift is architectural. York has been growing a certain type of building — box-led, developer-forward, optimised for efficiency and turnover, not expression or belonging.
They’re not awful. They’re not remarkable either. They’re Minecraftian: minimal detail, minimal ambition, minimal connection to the place they’re in. You can see the sustainability credentials, but you can also see the lack of character. A token nod to York’s “vernacular style” glued somewhere onto the facade doesn’t change the fact that these blocks could have been dropped into any city in the country.
The problem isn’t the modernity. York can handle modernity and embrace Passiv Haus thinking. The problem is the anonymity. Too many of these buildings are designed without acknowledging what surrounds them — the cultural layers, the long-standing spaces, the actual rhythm of the street. They’re built for financial models rather than neighbourhoods. And when one of these arrives next to a venue with deep community roots, the clash becomes structural. One grows culture; the other suppresses it.
Who does York Serve?
On a recent trip to Chester I noticed these lines carved into two small statues set into a corner of a building:
THE KING HIMSELF IS SERVED BY THE FIELD.
THE PROFIT OF THE EARTH IS FOR ALL.
A clear reminder that if value is created from a place, the people who live in that place should benefit. It stuck with me because York has been sliding away from that principle. Too many developments extract value without feeding anything back. Too many decisions are shaped around investors over residents. Too much of what gets approved benefits people who won’t feel the outcome of the decision — only the return.
It also highlighted the same contradiction seen around The Crescent and Victoria Vaults: more people buying into “city living” without understanding what city living actually means. The Chester lines stayed with me because they spoke to something York keeps wrestling with: who gets the benefit, who takes the impact, and who gets to redefine the expectations of a street they’ve only just arrived on.
Common Census
An uprising of planning objections won’t rewrite York’s future. But hundreds arriving at once show that resignation isn’t the only mood left in the city. People aren’t shouting. They’re not organising campaigns. They’re not romanticising venues or talking about heritage in abstract terms. They are making a simple point:
This development doesn’t fit here and the consequences aren’t worth the risk!
It shows that residents are still paying attention, and they will step forward when something crosses a line that’s been inching closer for years. Cities don’t collapse because of one big decision. They change because of a series of small ones that go unchallenged. This challenge resonated.
When the Music Stops, Who’s Left Listening?
The objections don’t only defend a venue. They reveal a city that isn’t as silent as it’s often made to feel. When the music stops — or looks like it might — the people left without an outlet are the ones who were here before, will be here after, and understand that York’s cultural life depends on more than marketing. They experience the impacts and shifts everyday and believe the city should be shaped by those who live in it, not just those who pop by or extract from it from afar.
The York music industry asked locals and patrons to speak up. This time they did and I hope they get heard.