York

• 1. Introduction

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  York sits at the meeting point of two rivers, the Ouse and the Foss, in North Yorkshire, and its story stretches back nearly ten thousand years. Mesolithic people settled in this region between 8000 and 7000 BC, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in Britain. The city has been a Roman fortress, a Viking capital, a wool-trading powerhouse, a railway hub, and a chocolate-manufacturing centre. It has survived plague, siege, flood, and the bombs of the Second World War. How did a single city at a river junction accumulate so many lives? And what holds all those identities together?

• 2. Eboracum to Jorvik

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  In AD 71, the Roman Ninth Legion drove north across the Humber, conquered the local Brigantes tribe, and drove stakes into the flat ground above the River Ouse. The wooden fortress they built covered 50 acres and held around 6,000 legionary soldiers. Later, the Sixth Legion replaced the Ninth and rebuilt those walls in stone. The site of the fortress headquarters, the principia, lies directly under York Minster's foundations; excavations in the undercroft have uncovered Roman columns still standing below the medieval cathedral.

  Three Roman emperors used this fortress as a base. Septimius Severus, who arrived between AD 207 and 211, declared York the capital of the province of Britannia Inferior. Constantius I died in York in AD 306, and the garrison immediately proclaimed his son Constantine the Great as emperor on the very spot. A bishop from York made the journey south to the Council of Arles in AD 314, evidence that Christianity had already taken root in the fortress city.

  After Roman administration withdrew, Angles settled York in the 5th century. King Edwin of Northumbria made it his chief city in the 7th century, and in 627 the first wooden minster church was raised for his baptism, according to the scholar the Venerable Bede. Edwin ordered a stone replacement, but he was killed in 633, leaving his successor Oswald to finish the work. From the cathedral school here, Alcuin of York rose to become Charlemagne's leading advisor on ecclesiastical and educational matters.

  In 866, the Vikings arrived. Led by Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan, they chose All Saints' Day for their assault, correctly calculating that York's leaders would be gathered in the cathedral and the town left unguarded. After the conquest, the city was renamed Jorvik. At its peak, Jorvik held more than 10,000 inhabitants, a population surpassed in Britain only by London. Archaeologists digging around the Coppergate area have found evidence of textile workshops, metalwork, glasswork, carving, and jewellery-making. Imported materials traced to the Persian Gulf confirm that Jorvik was woven into an international trading network stretching far beyond Scandinavia.

• 3. Norman Conquest and Medieval Power

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  Eric Bloodaxe, the last independent ruler of Jorvik, was driven from the city in AD 954 by King Eadred, completing England's unification under a single crown. Just over a century later, in 1068, two years after the Norman invasion of England, the people of York rebelled. William the Conqueror suppressed the uprising and immediately built a wooden fortress on a mound. When York rose again in 1069, William built a second timber castle on the opposite bank of the Ouse. He then unleashed what became known as the Harrying of the North, systematically destroying everything from York to Durham.

  In 1190, York Castle became the site of one of medieval England's worst acts of violence. At least 150 of the city's Jewish inhabitants were murdered there; some estimates put the figure as high as 500. King John granted York its first charter in 1212, confirming its trading rights across England and Europe. The charter reflected the city's position on the River Ouse and its proximity to the Great North Road, which had made York a crossroads for commerce. Medieval merchants imported wine from France, cloth from the Low Countries, timber and furs from the Baltic, and exported grain and wool in return.

  Edward I chose York as his operational base for the Scottish wars, injecting money and activity into the city. A charter from Richard II in 1396 extended the city's autonomy from central government. During the so-called Peasants' Revolt of 1381, York was also a scene of significant unrest, a reminder that medieval prosperity was never uniformly shared. The Archbishop of York held authority over the entire northern ecclesiastical province, giving the city religious weight that matched its commercial reach.

• 4. Tudor Upheaval and Civil War Siege

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  The Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII ended York's many monastic houses, including the hospitals of St Nicholas and St Leonard, the largest such institution in the north of England. That loss triggered the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Catholic uprising across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire that opposed religious reform. Henry responded by converting the dissolved St Mary's Abbey into the headquarters of the Council of the North, reasserting royal authority over the region through the very building the rebellion had sought to protect.

  On the 15th of September 1541, Henry VIII and Catherine Howard arrived in York on a royal progress. The Lord Mayor at the time of their arrival was Robert Hall, owner of a property at 74 Low Petergate. A special service was held at the Minster, after which the royal party rode to the converted abbey that now served as the king's palace. Anne of Denmark had visited a generation earlier, on the 11th of June 1603, accompanied by her children Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth. The Mayor offered her spiced wine; she asked for beer instead.

  Guy Fawkes was born and educated in York. He joined a group of Roman Catholic restorationists who planned the Gunpowder Plot, intending to blow up the Houses of Parliament while King James I and the Protestant nobility were inside. The scheme was uncovered before it could succeed. In 1644, during the English Civil War, Parliamentarian forces besieged York. Their attempt to undermine the barbican at Walmgate Bar with explosives was discovered. Prince Rupert arrived with an army of 15,000 men and broke the siege, but the Parliamentarians drew him into battle at Marston Moor, where 4,000 of his troops were killed and 1,500 captured. The city surrendered to Sir Thomas Fairfax on the 15th of July.

• 5. Railways, Chocolate, and Industry

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  George Hudson, a railway promoter, brought the first rail line to York in 1839. Hudson's career ended in disgrace and bankruptcy, but his decision to route the line through York rather than Leeds had lasting consequences. By the late 19th century, York had become a major national railway centre, hosting the headquarters of the North Eastern Railway, which employed more than 5,500 people at the turn of the 20th century.

  Rowntree's Cocoa Works was founded in 1862 by Henry Isaac Rowntree. His brother Joseph, a philanthropist, joined the business in 1869. The railways gave Rowntree's the reach it needed to distribute its products nationally, and the two industries grew in parallel. A second chocolate manufacturer, Terry's of York, also became a major employer. By 1900, railways and confectionery together formed the city's two largest industries.

  York was also a centre of early photography. The 1986 book Photographs and Photographers of York: The Early Years, 1844-79, written by Hugh Murray, documents studios run by William Hayes, William Pumphrey, and Augustus Mahalski. Mahalski operated on Davygate and Low Petergate, having arrived in England as a refugee after serving as a Polish lancer in the Austro-Hungarian war.

  In 1942 the Luftwaffe bombed York as part of the Baedeker Blitz. Ninety-two people were killed and hundreds were injured. Buildings hit included the Railway Station, Rowntree's Factory, Poppleton Road Primary School, St Martin-le-Grand Church, the Bar Convent, and the Guildhall, which remained in disrepair until 1960. Terry's chocolate factory closed on the 30th of September 2005, when its owners, Kraft Foods, moved production to Poland. On the 20th of September 2006, Nestlé announced 645 job cuts at the former Rowntree's factory.

• 6. Heritage, Tourism, and Modern York

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  In 1968 the historic core of York was designated a conservation area. The National Railway Museum opened in 1975, the Jorvik Viking Centre in 1984, and the York Dungeon in 1986. The University of York, which opened in 1963, added further momentum to the city's economy. In June 2007, York was voted European Tourism City of the Year by European Cities Marketing, beating 130 other cities and finishing ahead of Gothenburg and Valencia.

  The city's medieval walls remain the most complete in England. Their entire circuit runs approximately 2.5 miles and encloses 263 acres. The walls incorporate sections of the original Roman fortress and retain all their principal gateways. A stretch on the north-east side was never completed because the Norman moat, formed by damming the River Foss, created a lake that served as a natural defence; this lake was later known as the King's Fishpond.

  The Shambles, a narrow medieval street still lined with shops and tea rooms, takes its name from an old English word for an open-air slaughterhouse. Hooks for hanging carcasses and shelves for displaying meat can still be seen on some of the buildings. In July 2017, York CAMRA listed 107 pubs on its map of the city centre. A Beer Census conducted on the 18th of June 2016 found 328 unique real ales being served across more than 200 pubs in the city.

  Bettys Café Tea Rooms in St Helen's Square has its own unlikely origin story. Its founder, Frederick Belmont, sailed on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary in 1936. So struck was he by the ship's interior that he hired the Queen Mary's designers to transform a dilapidated furniture store into the café that opened in his name. During the Second World War, the basement bar became a gathering place for thousands of airmen stationed around York. A mirror on which many of them etched their signatures with a diamond pen still hangs there today, and St Peter's School, founded in AD 627, which Alcuin once attended and where Guy Fawkes was also educated, continues to operate in the city.

• 7. The York Mystery Plays

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  From the 14th century until 1570, the York Cycle of Mystery Plays was performed by the city's guilds from wagons at locations around York. Each guild took a play connected to its trade: the Shipwrights staged the Building of Noah's Ark, and the fish-sellers and mariners performed the Landing of Noah's Ark. The cycle is the most complete of its kind in England.

  The plays were revived in 1951 during the Festival of Britain. Dame Judi Dench appeared in the productions of 1951, 1954, and 1957 as a schoolgirl, and she remains a Patron of the cycle today. Lead roles over the years have also been taken by Christopher Timothy and Robson Green, who played the role of Christ. The cycle moved to a temporary open-air theatre within the ruins of St Mary's Abbey for later productions, before being performed inside York Minster in 2000. In 2012, the plays ran from the 2nd to the 27th of August at St Mary's Abbey in the York Museum Gardens, drawing audiences to the same ruined walls Henry VIII had converted into a palace nearly five centuries before.