York City Guide

City Walls, Minster & Shambles

From the station onto the royal gate of Micklegate Bar and along England's longest surviving medieval wall to the river. Through the abbey ruins in the Museum Gardens to the Minster with the country's largest medieval window, then into the Shambles, whose timber frames almost touch above the lane. After market and Viking museum it turns serious: Clifford's Tower, memorial site of the 1190 pogrom. The finale is free and mighty – the railway museum with the fastest steam locomotive in the world.

1. Micklegate Bar & City Walls – The entry into York is a gate with protocol: through Micklegate Bar, its core 12th-century, monarchs have ceremonially entered the city since Richard II in 1389 – with the city sword handed over to this day. The history above is coarser: for centuries the heads of the executed were spiked here, the last in 1754. Right at the gate you climb onto the wall walk – England's longest surviving medieval city wall, three and a half kilometres on Roman foundations of AD 71. The stretch to Lendal Bridge is your elevated overture with Minster views.
2. Museum Gardens & St Mary's Abbey – Beyond Lendal Bridge opens York's green living room: the Museum Gardens, laid out in the 1830s by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. In the middle of the lawn rears the arcade of St Mary's Abbey – once one of England's richest Benedictine monasteries, dissolved under Henry VIII and ever since the most elegant ruin of the north. The park also holds the Yorkshire Museum, one of Britain's first purpose-built museum houses: inside waits the famous marble head of Constantine – more on him at the Minster. Squirrels included, park entry free.
3. York Minster – World history was made on this square: on 25 July 306 the troops here proclaimed their general Constantine emperor – today he sits in bronze before the Minster. The cathedral itself, built from about 1230 to 1472, ranks among the largest Gothic churches of northern Europe, and its Great East Window is verifiably the largest single expanse of medieval stained glass in Britain: over three hundred panels, created 1405 to 1408 by John Thornton, together the size of a tennis court. If you don't fancy climbing the towers, the best outside view is free: from the wall stretch behind the choir.
4. The Shambles & Market – England's most famous lane already stood in the Domesday Book of 1086 – as the street of the flesh-shambles, the butchers' benches that gave it its name. The timber-framed houses of the 14th to 17th centuries jetty out further with each storey until they almost touch at the top: that once shaded the meat on display; today it frames the city's most photographed motif. The Harry Potter shops are explained by the resemblance to Diagon Alley – the Shambles was demonstrably not the model, the author never came here. The best view belongs to early morning; afterwards the market next door rescues you with over 75 stalls and street food.
5. Jorvik Viking Centre – Beneath Coppergate lay an entire Viking city: in 866 the Norsemen took York and made it, as Jórvík, a trading metropolis. The digs of 1976 to 1981 lifted some 40,000 finds and whole timber houses from the damp ground – preserved as almost nowhere else. Above it, in 1984, the Jorvik Viking Centre built one of Britain's first experience museums: in time capsules you ride through the reconstructed Jórvík, with voices, workshops and very honest smells. Suspected kitsch? Unfounded – beneath the glass floor lie the real excavations.
6. Clifford's Tower – On this castle mound stands York's heaviest memory: on 16 March 1190 the city's entire Jewish community, some 150 people, fled from an incited mob into the wooden predecessor tower. Trapped without escape, many chose death by their own hand; the rest were murdered on leaving the tower. In the end, hardly anyone was held to account. A plaque at the foot of the mound has recalled this since 1978, and around the anniversary daffodils with six-pointed blooms flower on the slope, a quiet memorial in flower form. Today's stone tower dates from the 13th century; from its wall walk you look out over a city that deliberately tells this place as a site of remembrance.
7. National Railway Museum – The finale costs nothing and impresses most: in the National Railway Museum, right behind the station, the queens of the rails stand in a vast hall – above all "Mallard", the streamlined blue locomotive which, according to the museum, still holds the speed record for steam. Add royal saloon carriages from Victoria to Elizabeth and a Japanese Shinkansen. The famous "Flying Scotsman" has its home here but is regularly on tour around the country – meeting her is a matter of luck. For a city you arrive in by train anyway, there is no more fitting close.