York: the chocolate box city. Home to cobbled streets populated by costumed historical characters stationed outside every reassuringly twee tearoom…
This vision of York remains stubbornly popular – but it’s as narrow as the city’s slenderest snickelway.
There is history here of course, centuries of the stuff. John Kirk’s Victorian street still delights, nearly 80 years after it first opened in the Castle Museum. Yet dig a little deeper and you can find livelier, edgier, more bizarre tales of bygone times, from York’s version of the Hell-Fire Club to the Cold War bunker built to save the chosen few from nuclear annihilation.
Meanwhile York is shaking off its “living museum” label and is busy building a future to live up to its past. That can be seen everywhere from the glassy modernist Hiscox HQ to the experimental art and music in the Basement Bar.
Old haunts are being repurposed: a cafe above York’s only remaining barbican, a cinema in a pub, a library created inside a park-keeper’s lodge. Millions of pounds have been invested in buzzy new places to eat and drink.
Amid all this, the essential eccentricity of this overgrown town remains intact. It is the sort of place where people have no qualms in opening the world’s smallest Lego shop, or welding a van to a tugboat to create a floating ice cream parlour. Who wouldn’t want to visit a shop that sells only cheese, or another named after a Bob Dylan lyric?
This guide is not about York’s most famous landmarks but its quirky corners, and most important, its people, past and present. It has been a pleasure and an education seeking them out.
– Chris Titley