If you happen to be reading this on Friday evening, I invite you to picture me making merry at the Michaelmas Feast of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York, which is about to celebrate its 650th anniversary and of which I am a rather junior member. Our founders — mercers trading in cloth with the Low Countries and the Baltic ports — were the drivers and networkers of York’s mediaeval economy, and its first exponents of globalisation. But our merriment this week will be dampened by the latest impact of that phenomenon on the city. Nestlé, owner of the confectionery factory that is still universally referred to as Rowntrees, has just announced the shedding of 645 jobs in a reorganisation that involves moving production of Smarties to Hamburg and of Black Magic to the Czech Republic.
This follows the closure of Terry’s (the Chocolate Orange was last seen somewhere in Slovakia) and the loss of 450 Norwich Union jobs to call centres in India. British Sugar will close its beet-processing plant next year. York’s other major industry, railway carriage-making, is already extinct; its only legacy is a huge brownfield site blighted by interminable planning arguments. Some of the jobs have been replaced by work in the tourism sector, and you could be forgiven for thinking that York’s last remaining economic advantage is its mediaeval heritage — the Merchant Adventurers’ hall being a prime attraction. Worse still, Gordon Brown has made York dependent on his own largesse: the number of public sector jobs has grown by 42 per cent since 1996, and Defra is now one of the city’s biggest employers.
But there is a chink of light. A co-operation between the university and the city council under the label of Science City York has helped create a cluster of pioneering high-tech businesses — the likes of Cizzle Biotechnology, in the field of lung cancer treatment — which might one day make York as famous in bioscience as it once was in chocolate.

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