No one in the column of tourists making their way to York Minster looked at Northern House. The beige 1960s architecture is not a building that gets a lot of passion.
The layers of mud beneath it are different. A plan to demolish Northern House and create a new Roman themed visitor centre has caused a row among archaeologists.
The York Archaeology Trust and a local developer, North Star, want to create an enormous underground museum filled with Roman artifacts, which will be found below Northern House.
The name of the Roman quarter would be Eboracum, and Northern House would build a 10-storey building to replace it.
Historic England described the plan as confusing and contradictory.
Neil Redfern, the executive director of the CBA, which represents more than 600 institutions, said they were shocked by the brutal approach taken with this particular development. He said that archaeologists are usually brought on board after a development is proposed.
We want to dig a very big hole to find the material that we might put in the visitor centre, that's what this proposal is about. We need a large building on top to afford that.
The current Northern House is not a good example of town planning. It will become one of York's most hated buildings if this is built.
There are many unanswered questions. What happens to the rest of the site if only a third of it is excavated? If they make an extraordinary find, what happens if they dig down six metres to Roman levels? If they don't find anything, what happens to the visitor centre plan? If the developer goes bust or sells on the planning permission, what will happen?
Sheltering from hailstones at the back of Northern House, David Jennings, the chief executive of YAT, has answers to some of the questions. He is confident that the two-year deadline would not compromise the dig, since techniques have improved since the 1980s. A lot of material was lost when Northern House was built, so they only excavated a third of the land.
This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it has not been seen in 30 years. There was a Roman camp on the southern bank of the River Ouse, with a road leading to a bridge over the river.
We are going to be able to explain the connections around the old Roman road and the economy of the city. In the previous digs we found a dormouse and bits of Roman tents in the name of a centurion who is referred to at Hadrian's Wall.
This area has a hodge-podge of architectural styles that were created before the area was created. Smaller buildings in York make developers less likely to pay for archaeological investigations.
The location, scale, and relationship between us and a local development community make this one of the few places that it can be done.
The headquarters of the CBA are five minutes from Northern House. The city is a site of international significance partly because of the history that happened nearby, from Constantine's proclamation as emperor in 306 to the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, but also because the city's waterlogged earth has preserved so much material.
The archaeological dig conducted in 1976 to 1981 led to the creation of Eboracum, which is twice the size of the hugely successful Jorvik Viking Centre.
The lack of oxygen in the water allowed the preservation of leather shoes, the timber from two-storey Viking houses, and even the cesspits, which were sealed with lime. The tourism industry in Britain is back to pre-pandemic levels after the opening of a new City Walls centre and the reopening of the motte and bailey castle.
Plans for a visitor centre at the Tower were scrapped.
The above-ground expression of buildings, street patterns and burgage plots is a reflection of what is below the ground.
This building cuts across that.
The York Archaeological Trust is a good archaeological unit. I don't think they chose the right option.
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