York

The York City Walls run for 2.11 miles (3.4 km), the longest circuit of town walls in England, and most of it is a raised walkway you can follow at your own pace. The four main gatehouses, called bars, each have their own character. Bootham Bar, closest to the Minster, keeps some stonework from the eleventh century. Monk Bar is the tallest and most elaborate, a four-storey early fourteenth-century gatehouse whose portcullis still works. Walmgate Bar has the only surviving barbican on a town gate in England, with an Elizabethan house built out over the gateway. Micklegate Bar was the ceremonial entrance for monarchs arriving from the south, and the place where the heads of traitors were displayed. The audio guides for each bar tell those stories as you pass through.

The Shambles is the street everyone photographs, and with good reason. Its timber-framed buildings, many of them from between 1350 and 1475, lean so far over the lane that their upper floors nearly touch. The name comes from an Old English word for a butcher's stall; by 1426 it was recorded as the Great Flesh Shambles, and the shaded position kept meat fresh while the waste drained down the gutters. The last butchers closed in the early twentieth century, but some fronts still carry their meat hooks. A shrine on the street remembers Margaret Clitherow, the butcher's wife who was martyred for sheltering Catholic priests. Behind it, Shambles Market fills the space once known as Newgate Market, and nearby Stonegate carries the same medieval line past old shop signs and hidden courtyards toward the Minster.

Dig a few metres under Coppergate and you reach Jorvik, the Viking town; the JORVIK Viking Centre was built on the excavation site and recreates the tenth-century streets, smells included. A short walk south, Clifford's Tower rises on the motte William the Conqueror's men raised in 1068. In 1190 the wooden keep that stood here became the scene of one of the darkest episodes in English medieval history, when around 150 of York's Jews died rather than surrender to a mob. Henry III rebuilt it in stone between 1245 and 1272 in an unusual four-lobed quatrefoil plan, and an explosion on St George's Day 1684 gutted the interior while leaving the walls standing. Since 2022 a new roof deck has opened up the view over the whole city. Beside it, the York Castle Museum occupies the old prison buildings of the castle and tells the everyday side of the city's story.

The quietest corner of the old city is the Museum Gardens beside the Ouse, where the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, once one of the great Benedictine houses of the north, stand on the lawns. Here you also find the Multangular Tower, the most intact Roman structure left in York, added to the fortress corner around 310 to 320 and still showing small Roman stonework below the larger medieval blocks above. The Yorkshire Museum on the same grounds holds the Roman, Viking and medieval finds that explain what you have just been walking over.

George Hudson brought the railway to York in 1839, and by 1900 trains and sweets were the city's two great industries. The National Railway Museum, opened in 1975 just behind the station, is the largest of its kind in the world, with famous locomotives lined up under one roof. Rowntree's, founded by Henry Isaac Rowntree in 1862, gave the world the Kit Kat, and Terry's was the city's other great chocolate employer; York's Chocolate Story tells how Quaker grocers turned York into a sweet-making capital. For the city's best-known afternoon ritual, join the queue at Bettys Café Tea Rooms on St Helen's Square.

York's historic centre sits inside the walls and is almost entirely walkable; the station is a ten-minute stroll from the Minster across Lendal Bridge. Direct trains link York with both London and Edinburgh, which makes it an easy stop between the two capitals. Allow two days to do the city justice, and a third for Castle Howard or Fountains Abbey in the countryside beyond.