🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Northern England
If you had to choose a single city to understand two thousand years of English history, York would be a perfect candidate. In this corner of northern England, on the banks of the River Ouse, layers pile up like a cake: the Roman fortress where an emperor was proclaimed, the capital of a Viking kingdom, the walled medieval city, the most important ecclesiastical seat in the north and the prosperous Victorian city of the railway and chocolate. All of it in a compact, pedestrian, extraordinarily well-preserved old town.
York is its Gothic cathedral — York Minster, one of the largest in northern Europe — its medieval walls that you can walk, its crooked lanes such as The Shambles, with timber houses that almost touch across the street, and its ghosts: it is said to be one of the most 'haunted' cities in England, and ghost tours are part of local folklore. But it is also the Viking world of the Jorvik Viking Centre, the locomotives of the National Railway Museum (free) and the smell of chocolate left behind by its industry (Rowntree and Terry's were born here).
This guide covers York with a practical, warm eye: what to see without rushing, how to climb the cathedral tower, how to walk the walls, how much the big attractions cost and which are free, how to get here by train from London using cheap tickets, and how to experience the Christmas market and the ghost tours. Compact, historic and full of character, York is one of the most complete escapes in the United Kingdom.
York was born as Eboracum, a fortress and town founded by the Romans around AD 71 that became the capital of Roman Britain in the north; the emperor Constantius Chlorus died here and his troops proclaimed his son Constantine the Great emperor in 306. After the Roman withdrawal, it was an Anglo-Saxon centre of the kingdom of Northumbria, until in 866 the Danish Vikings' 'Great Heathen Army' conquered it and turned it into Jórvík, capital of a prosperous Viking kingdom. The Norman conquest of 1066 brought destruction with William the Conqueror's brutal 'Harrying of the North' and the building of castles. In the Middle Ages, York flourished as the kingdom's second city and seat of the archbishopric; from that period come its walls, its churches and the start of the great cathedral. A tragic episode marked its medieval history: the massacre of York's Jewish community in 1190, in the castle tower (where Clifford's Tower now stands). During the English Civil War, the city suffered the siege of 1644, linked to the Battle of Marston Moor. And in the nineteenth century, the railway and the Rowntree and Terry's chocolate factories turned it into an industrial city. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The land of Viking York and the Industrial Revolution: Manchester and its cotton mills, Liverpool and its links with the slave trade and with the Beatles, the Peterloo massacre and the wild lakes of the Lake District.
Read the history of Northern England →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
York's history begins with the Roman legions. Around AD 71, the Roman army advancing into northern Britannia built a military fortress at the meeting of the rivers Ouse and Foss, a strategic point for controlling the territory of the Brigantes, the Celtic people of the region. They called it Eboracum, a name of Celtic root that probably referred to a place of yew trees. A civilian town grew up around the fortified camp, and in time Eboracum became the capital of the province of Britannia Inferior and the great centre of Roman power in the north of the island.
Its importance was such that emperors visited. Septimius Severus directed his campaigns against the northern peoples from here and died in the city in 211. But the most far-reaching episode came almost a century later. In 306, the emperor Constantius Chlorus died at Eboracum during a campaign, and the troops stationed there proclaimed his son, Constantine, emperor on the spot. That Constantine would later be known as Constantine the Great, the emperor who legalised Christianity in the Roman Empire and founded Constantinople, changing the course of Western history. That his rise to power happened in York gives the city a unique place in European history, commemorated today by a bronze statue of the emperor, unveiled in 1998, seated in front of the cathedral.
Beneath today's York Minster there are still remains of the basilica and the headquarters of the Roman fortress, which can be seen in the Undercroft museum. When Roman power withdrew from Britannia at the beginning of the fifth century, Eboracum went into decline, but the city would not disappear: it was destined to be reborn again and again.
After the Roman withdrawal, York re-emerged as the centre of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, one of the great kingdoms of early England. It was here, in 627, that King Edwin of Northumbria converted to Christianity and was baptised, and where the first wooden church dedicated to St Peter was built, the seed of the future cathedral. York (then called Eoforwic) became an important religious and intellectual centre: in the eighth century, its school and library were famous throughout Europe, and out of it came Alcuin of York, the great scholar who advised Charlemagne and was one of the driving forces of the Carolingian cultural renaissance.
Everything changed on 1 November 866. That day, the Danish Vikings' 'Great Heathen Army', taking advantage of Northumbria's internal struggles, captured York with almost no resistance. The Vikings stayed, and adapted the name to their own language: Jórvík, which has been interpreted as 'wild boar bay'. For almost a century, York was the capital of a prosperous Viking kingdom, the Kingdom of Jórvík, ruled by Scandinavian kings and settled by Danish colonists who turned it into a major trading and craft centre, connected to the trade routes of the Viking world, from Dublin to the Baltic.
Thanks to exceptional soil conditions, the Coppergate archaeological excavations in the late 1970s brought to light houses, workshops, streets and thousands of everyday objects from that Viking Jórvík, extraordinarily well preserved. That find, one of the most important about the Viking world, gave rise to the Jorvik Viking Centre and made it possible to reconstruct in detail how the people of tenth-century York lived, traded and died. The Viking era ended in 954, when the last king of Jórvík, Eric Bloodaxe, was expelled and the kingdom was absorbed for good into a unified England, but the Norse mark was carved in for ever, even in the names of many York streets, which still end in '-gate' (from 'gata', street in Old Norse).
The Norman conquest of England in 1066 hit York hard. The north of England, with its strong Anglo-Scandinavian heritage, resisted the new king William the Conqueror. Faced with revolts, William responded with a merciless punitive campaign between 1069 and 1070, known as the Harrying of the North: his troops razed villages, burned crops, killed livestock and caused a famine that, according to the chronicles, killed tens of thousands and left much of Yorkshire depopulated for years. York was sacked and much of it destroyed. To secure control, the Normans built two castles on either side of the river; the mound of one of them is the one crowned today by Clifford's Tower.
The city recovered slowly and, through the Middle Ages, flourished again until it became the second most important city in England after London. It was a major ecclesiastical centre — seat of the Archbishop of York, the second dignity of the English Church after Canterbury — and work began on today's York Minster, built over more than two and a half centuries, between 1220 and 1472.
But York's medieval history also includes one of its darkest and most tragic chapters. In March 1190, in a climate of growing fanaticism and antisemitic violence spreading across England, the Jewish community of York was the target of an atrocious attack. Pursued by a mob, some 150 Jews — men, women and children, though some sources put the figure higher — took refuge in the wooden tower of the royal castle, on the mound where Clifford's Tower now stands. Besieged, with no way out and facing the certainty of a violent death or forced conversion, many chose to take their own lives; the rest were killed when the tower went up in flames. It was one of the gravest massacres of Jews in medieval England. The episode is remembered today soberly with a commemorative plaque at the foot of Clifford's Tower, as a memorial to the victims and a warning against hatred.
The following centuries brought new upheavals. The dissolution of the monasteries ordered by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century did away with extremely wealthy religious institutions such as St Mary's Abbey, whose evocative ruins can still be seen in the Museum Gardens. And in the seventeenth century, the English Civil War — the clash between the supporters of King Charles I and those of Parliament — put York in the front line. The city, loyal to the Crown, was besieged by parliamentary armies in 1644. The siege was temporarily lifted by the arrival of Prince Rupert and his 15,000 men, but on 2 July 1644 the royalist forces were crushed at the nearby Battle of Marston Moor, one of the largest and most decisive of the war. With that defeat the siege resumed and York surrendered on 15 July to Sir Thomas Fairfax. Notably, the treasures of the cathedral and the churches were spared, which allowed their medieval stained glass to survive to this day.
After centuries as an elegant Georgian city of commerce and society, the great transformation came in the nineteenth century with the railway. Thanks to the drive of the local entrepreneur George Hudson, nicknamed the 'Railway King', York became one of the great railway hubs of England. The train not only brought travellers and trade but also boosted an industry that would shape the city's modern identity: chocolate.
Two great Quaker families made York a chocolate capital. The Rowntrees, whose factory (founded in 1862 by Henry Isaac Rowntree) grew to employ thousands of people and create world-famous brands such as KitKat, Aero and Smarties; and the Terrys, with their famous Terry's Chocolate Orange. These companies not only gave work to much of the city but, out of their Quaker values, built housing, schools and facilities for their workers, leaving a deep social mark. The Terry's factory closed in 2005, with production moved to Poland, but York is still home to the local Nestlé operation (heir to Rowntree) and to the KitKat, and its sweet history is celebrated in attractions devoted to chocolate.
Contemporary York has managed to turn its extraordinary accumulation of history into its greatest asset. Unlike many English cities transformed by heavy industry and twentieth-century rebuilding, York kept its medieval fabric intact: the most complete circuit of walls in England, the tangle of lanes in the old town, streets such as The Shambles with their fourteenth-century timber houses, and the Gothic mass of York Minster dominating it all. That heritage has made it one of the best-loved tourist destinations in the United Kingdom.
The city has had to look after and restore that legacy. The cathedral itself went through critical moments: in the twentieth century, the central tower threatened to collapse and its foundations had to be reinforced in a complex engineering operation in the 1960s and 1970s; and in 1984 a fire, attributed to lightning, destroyed part of the south transept, which was rebuilt. The River Ouse also makes its presence felt periodically with floods that affect the centre, a constant challenge for a city built beside the water.
Today York lives off its history without being frozen in it. Its museums — the Jorvik Viking Centre, the National Railway Museum (the largest of its kind in the world and free to enter), the York Castle Museum, the Yorkshire Museum — tell each of its layers, from the Romans to the Vikings, from the Normans to the railway age. Its reputation as a 'haunted' city feeds a thriving tradition of ghost tours, and its St Nicholas Fair Christmas market draws crowds every December. A university, food-loving, pedestrian city, York manages that difficult balance of being at once a two-thousand-year-old museum city and a living, inhabited place, where the past is not a postcard but the very ground you walk on at every step.