York Historic Environment Record

Public Baths, furnace etc. and remains of other unidentified buildings, were found on the site for the old Railway Station and yard in 1839–40, during excavations for the station building, and again in 1939 in excavating for a bomb shelter in the mound of the mediaeval defences behind the old Station. Many fragments over a large area were uncovered; several could be identified as belonging to baths, but those recorded with any accuracy were isolated; the result is that they cannot be related together in a consistent plan. Indeed there is no certainty that all the fragments belonged to the same complex; nor need all have been contemporary, for the 1939 excavations demonstrated that the buildings had had a complicated structural history. Individual elements include: -a rectangular room with apsidal end -a suite of 5 or more rooms including plunge baths -rooms including a plunge bath and furnace flanked by pillars -Caladarium made of a large hall and adjoining room with hypocaust system -structures near caladarium -a substantial wall associated with several foundations and cement floors -miscellaneous finds and remains Even with these reservations, however, clearly the baths were important and extensive. They included a caldarium that has been described as the largest in Britain (Arch. J., CIII (1947), 76). All the buildings of ascertained alignment were, with one minor exception, parallel not with the main Road 10 but with the minor Road 8. Most of the buildings lay N.E. Of the continuation of this last. Traces of earlier use of the site included 1st-century timber buildings, also on the minor road alignment. The site encroached on the N.W. And S.W. Upon a cemetery, but the relationship between buildings and burials was not properly recorded even where the two overlapped. Modern analysis is further confused by the later use of the area for a friary; this too had its burials, which, from the inadequate records made, are not always distinguishable from the Roman burials. Further excavation in 2011-2012 revealed further structures forming elements of this complex predominantly evidence of timber buildings replaced in masonry.