Have you been to York? Have you sauntered along its narrow, meandering medieval streets, with their peculiar names – such as Swinegate, Lendal, Ogleforth, or Fossgate – that evoke a pre-modern age? Have you strolled up Museum Street, passing medieval walls and imposing crenellated stone gateways – known as bars for some reason, where severed heads were once displayed on spikes? Have you turned a corner in this city and suddenly found yourself confronting the enormous west façade of York Minster, soaring above you?
York is magnificent, as magnificent as any medieval city in Christendom
Because if you have, then you will know something about this great city – something you may not have voiced. But you’ll know it in your bones: York is magnificent, as magnificent as any medieval city in Christendom. It’s the nearest thing England has to Florence, except it’s in Yorkshire. It is, if you will, Firenze in the rain. And we should celebrate York as such, instead of simply thinking of it as a place that the train stops at on the way to Newcastle or home to a peculiar Viking museum or one of the rougher racecourses.
Because York is every bit as good as Florence. Yes, it’s wetter and greyer, and you can hardly imagine E. M. Forster writing a deeply romantic story of sun-kissed Edwardian love there. However, its cathedral is breathtaking, and while it lacks Brunelleschi’s dome or Vasari’s frescoes, it is every bit as imposing and as marvellous as the duomo in Florence – perhaps more so. Its exterior may not shimmer in black and white marble, but that great west façade of York basks in the evening sunshine. The 150-metre-long York Minster levitates above the historic centre of the city like a citadel. It took 250 years to build, with the two astonishingly beautiful west towers added last in the 1400s prior to its consecration in 1472. Just like Arnolfo di Cambio’s Florentine duomo with its spectacular Filippo Brunelleschi dome, York Minster is a structure that commands your attention because it’s so majestic. Walk the walls of York – which I suspect owe more to enthusiastic Victorian restoration than the medieval men who first built them – and you can’t help but be mesmerised by its presence. Which is the point; because the more you look at York, the more Florence makes sense – and vice versa.
As well as the cathedral, York has a river – it’s very own Arno. The great River Ouse flows from the River Ure that runs through North Yorkshire’s luscious, rolling Wensleydale landscape of castles, ruined monasteries, and sheep and cheese. And while York doesn’t have the Uffizi, groaning with Titians, Botticellis, and da Vincis, it does have the York Art Gallery with some impressive British ceramics and a rather nice exhibition on William Morris’s wallpaper. What’s more, York has a substantial museum where artefacts include Yorkshire’s very own Excalibur, the ninth-century Gilling Sword found in the 1970s by a lad playing in a stream near Richmond (for which he was awarded a Blue Peter badge). It’s worth making the trip for that alone. Just nearby are the ruins of St Mary’s Benedictine Abbey, while the lush museum gardens also contain an old monastic Hospitium in stone and timber.
Everywhere you turn in York there is a timbered building or stone structure of striking antiquity which cries out for your attention. Take the incredible Merchant Adventurers’ Hall – a timber-framed building dating from the 1400s that is an epic architectural survivor. It really is a national architectural treasure, and if it were in London, it would be known as such. If it were in Florence, tourists would be queuing around the block just to look inside.
York has all this and much else besides – not an enormous Victorian railway station, which is a cathedral to iron and 19th-century industrial innovation. Even on a damp autumnal English day, York is full of tourists ambling through its medieval streets, speaking almost every language under the sun. What’s clear is that the rest of the world knows about York and sees what many of us here appear to be blind to: this is a world city, one that’s every bit as good as places we flock to overseas. It’s also got pubs.
Yet because it’s wet, stolid old Yorkshire – famous for Chocolate Oranges and Yorkie Bars – it’s been overlooked. So when the next half-term rolls around, or you fancy a weekend away, spare yourself the pain of Ryanair or the temptations of EasyJet. Board a train for York. It’s Florence in the rain.
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