THERE'S no particular theme to the first part of Yesterday Once More this week. We simply rummaged through an old box file kept on a shelf at The Press offices labelled 'Historic pics, York'. Inside is a series of brown envelopes, each with photographs of different York streets, buildings and bridges.

We'll start with St Helen's Square. A photograph taken in 1900, possibly by William Hayes, a well-known photographer of the day, shows the crowds which had gathered to witness a visit by the Prince of Wales, Prince Albert Edward. Less than a year after this photograph was taken, on the death of Queen Victoria, Edward was to become King Edward VII: but at the time of this visit to York he was very much still a king in waiting. He was in York to be granted the freedom of the city: and clearly the people of York were quite excited to see him. We particularly like the man in the front left of the photo, standing on what looks like an upturned box so he can see over the heads of the crowd...

Next up, we have an extraordinary photograph from October 1959 showing workmen on Skeldergate Bridge. The bridge, which replaced an earlier ferry crossing at Skeldergate, opened in 1881, but by the time this photo was taken it was clearly in some need of repair.

There is nothing on the photograph to indicate what the workmen were doing, but we suspect they may have been working on the join where the lifting section of the bridge met the main surface. The bridge was originally built as a lifting bridge, with winding machinery housed in a toll house which still remains (it's now a café). Eventually the lifting mechanism seized up through lack of use. The bridge was last opened in 1975, and the winding mechanism has since been removed. A rare photograph from 1955, however, shows the eastern span of the bridge in the raised position.

You may wonder what on earth the strange wooden structure standing near St William's College in our fourth photo is. The caption on the back of the photo gives some answers. "In the shadow of York Minster stands this pile of timber, the skeleton of an old York house, the last remains of what is said to have been the Parliament House, which has stood on this site for more than 40 years," it reads. The earliest date on the back of the photo is May 1949, but we suspect it may be older than that. Do any readers know?

Another photograph, taken from a postcard, shows the interior courtyard of St William's College - presumably in late Victorian or very early Edwardian times, since the card was posted in 1905. You may think the courtyard looks a little shabby, and you would be right: for much of the Victorian period the ancient college was used as tenement slum housing for York's poor.

Another postcard next - this one showing York Railway Station. A note on the back says the card was posted in 1923, but we suspect that the photograph may have been taken quite a few years before that, perhaps at the end of the Victorian age. We love the horse and cart coming out of what is now the taxi rank.

And finally, a photograph from 1964, showing the demolition of condemned houses in the Newbiggin Street and St John's Street area of the city. The Minster rises serene in the background above a scene of utter devastation that might have looked familiar to anyone who had lived through the blitz.

Stephen Lewis