Part Two – The City Centre 

 All right-thinking folk know that the Shambles is York's Heart of Darkness.  The name originally had something to do with the butchers shops which once lined the way.  But the modern meaning of the word sums the street up nicely.  Basically there is a difference between tourism, which is fine, and tourist-orientated, which emphatically isn't.  A ghastly melange of over-priced knick-knack shops, the best thing you can say about the Shambles is that it doesn't contain an establishment beginning with Ye Olde.  This dishonour belongs to Stonegate, possibly the second worst street in the centre of York.

 But, you cry, the Shambles has rickety buildings!  It has cobbles!  Yes, yes, yes.  You can get plentiful rickety buildings in Goodramgate which, as we shall see below, has a soul as well.  And if you want the cobbles experience, i.e. almost twisting your ankle while imagining the effluence which once flowed through the gaps between the stones, there are two streets leading onto Goodramgate.  Namely, Chapter House Street and the wonderfully named Ogleforth, where there is also a sense of genuine rather than faux antiquity.  Turn north at Minster Yard and pass through gates bearing the sign 'This Area Is Not Dedicated To The Public So Bugger Off, You Heathens.'  The pleasant Minster Gardens lie beyond, haunt of underdressed students during summer afternoons and scattered groups of winos in the winter.  Ancient stone monuments stand on the far left.  On is the Minster Library which contains a trove of rare texts though, presumably, not a thesaurus.  Keep going straight on after you leave the park and you get onto Chapter House Street.  The well-known Treasurers House is on the left; on the right are the backs of old brick constructions, together with a wall which seems to lean more and more over the pavement every time I pass.  A right turn brings you onto Ogleforth, first of whose delights is a rare example of a garage with an overhanging upper story.  Past that is a stone building with an impressive semi-circular window; and past that is something entirely bizarre.  Made of dark red brick with decorative window boxes and slightly gothic pinnacles, it is an attractive sight.  But it is about three quarters the proper size.  Perfectly proportioned, just to the wrong scale.  You can picture the man who commissioned looking at the blueprints and admiring the details, but not quite checking the measurements.  When it was completed he walks around it, rubbing his chin and realising something has gone horribly wrong.  By then, of course, the architect is on a coach to Hull, heading for the docks with increasing speed.  Sadly the house is not open to the public.  If it were I'm sure we would find the ceilings four feet high, like Floor 13A in Being John Malkovich.  The only clue about its current function is a sign in the window saying House.  A house called House.  There is no other building in the world which I would more like to pat lovingly on the head.  I could probably reach too.

 Take a brief detour here, turning left to pass through the Monk Bar and enter Monkgate.  The most striking sight initially, visible across a bafflingly microscopic graveyard, is a huge sign painted on the side of a building advertising Bile Beans.  We are, of course, extremely proud of this banner.  When the words started fading away, we demanded that they be restored to their old glory.  I knew a woman who had a painting of the sign hanging in her living room.  'Bile Beans: Keeps You Healthy, Bright-Eyed and Slim.'  A product no longer with us, sadly.  They were some sort of quackish cure for diarrhoea and sound a little too disgusting even for that function.  Carry on down Monkgate and you soon come to a vast Methodist church built of striking orange brick  If you think that the Houses of Parliament were the absolute nadir of Victorian architecture or that huge monstrosities were only invented in the post-war years, take a look at this church.  Examine it keenly and bathe in its unrepentant ghastliness.  Personally I think that Methodism makes many salient points.  But if this was my nearest place of worship then I would switch to Catholicism.  Or Satanism.  Or anything.  Roughly opposite the church, set back from the road, is an old hospital.  Another nineteenth century brick construction, it is both more simply designed – basically a great cuboid – and infinitely more impressive than John Wesley's effort.  Nowadays it has been turned into expensive flats so you can pay a small fortune to sleep in the same spot where somebody once had their gangrenous leg amputated.  On a vaguely related topic, close by is a massage parlour which once got into the papers for offering, shall we say, some more intimate services.  I don’t know if it still does, if it ever did or if there is a massage parlour in the country which doesn’t have a reputation for being a covert knocking shop.  It's a rumour worth investigating, though, if the strains of Methodism get too much.  Finally, on the right hand side of the road as you approach a roundabout, look the front gardens of the houses.  One has a large statue of a hand, palm facing the heavens.  There is no sign and no apparent function to this, the house apparently being a private residence.  And it's not as if there is a vast expanse to fill and all the gnomes and gazebos got used up.  The 'garden' is about two feet by four and otherwise contains barren slate.  Somebody, at some time, must have just wanted a sculpture of a giant hand.  And I think this something we should all applaud.  After viewing the Hand of Monkgate you might as well turn back and return through the bar.

 Monk Bar boasts some curious, undersized stone figures on its crest  and two long-established shops in its shadows; the Aladdin's cave of – definitely, absolutely legal – second-hand goods that is Bulmers and then the Monkbar Model Shop.  We are now in Goodramgate, one of the few genuinely attractive tourist streets in York.  Part of the charm comes from the establishments.  Bustling restaurants stand alongside oddities shops.  The best of the latter breed is Wooden Horse, a sort of One Stop Goth Dealers.  The finest restaurant is a pizza parlour allegedly haunted by the ghost of Marmaduke Buckle, a crippled boy who hung himself.  A caveat though: I worked here when it was a traditional English restaurant.  Traditional English food being what it is, the grease on the kitchen walls became crusted two feet deep and probably splattered over the poor ghost. You also need to look above the shops to get a proper appreciation of Goodramgate.  It is a road built over quite a number of centuries with no proper planning whatsoever.  Old brick houses stand alongside others whitewashed or painted fading pastel colours.  Half way down is Lady Row, dating back to 1316 and containing the oldest surviving houses in the city.  The white terrace gives a real sense of what medieval urban life was like.  The upper floors overhang alarmingly, of course, and the thickness of the walls implies – probably justifiably – that there was no faith whatsoever in the supports.  And standing opposite, doubtless in deliberate mockery, is a truly vile mini-arcade.  Though a little more recent than its neighbour it may not last as long, already being in an acute state of decay.  The arcade holds a supermarket for the truly desperate and all the materials for its construction seem to have been bought from there.

 Charity shops are also in abundance on Goodramgate.  My favourite, from a very biased perspective, is the Oxfam on the corner of Aldwark.  It is something of a Tardis of a place.  Customers who only see the modest shop facade often blink in confusion as they enter and watch it stretch back for several miles, holding rack upon rack of old tweed skirts and leather bondage trousers.  And they only see a quarter of it.  The extensive basements have a bewildering selection of unsellable bric-a-brac and free newspaper CD's.  Upstairs are a several thousand garments waiting to go onto the shop floor and several thousand more still in plastic bags waiting to be processed.  And the floor above that?  Another few thousand bags, together with a desolate toilet and a locked room with a hilariously unsafe floor.  There is the detritus of the past fifty years of civilisation here, sometimes earlier; the staff toilets on the first floor have a fine basin and latrine circa 1920.  We ought to turn the back rooms into a museum and give tours.  Come in anyway, though, for the shop floor still holds enough fascinating clutter.  You might find a Chinese-language guide to Windows 97, a guide to coping with erectile dysfunction, a Gene Hackman film stolen from a Cyprus video library, an old Soviet Union water heater or a pair of ceramic severed feet bearing the motto 'I walked my feet off at Cincinnati Zoo.'

 York is understandably proud of its buskers.  They are numerous, they are often odd, they are sometimes even competent.  Set pitches have been informally established and each tends to attract a distinct type of busker.  Duncombe Place, just in front of the Minster, is for the soloists, whether a crazed bluegrass artiste with a steel guitar, a man in impeccable navy uniform crooning through the 1950's or a floppy-haired student murdering 'Wonderwall.'.  Stonegate has mime artists and deserves no better.  In Parliament Street you either get school brass bands or South American panpipes.  St Switham's Square can be a bit more avante garde when it isn't full of giant inflatable slides.  (Surreal enough in themselves, possibly).  Once there were two Americans in Elvis wigs and shades saluting to patriotic songs and checking the crowds for 'undesirables.'  Another month produced the ultimate in minimalist busking, a ghetto blaster sat all alone with a begging bowl underneath.  And Kings Square, at the end of Goodramgate, is where to go if you have an understandable penchant for shouty escapologists.  It is a sad, rare Sunday when a man in a straightjacket bawling witticisms at the crowd cannot be found in the old square.

 The Shambles begins at the far side of Kings Square.  So hurriedly swing sharp left instead, turning down St Andrew Gate which runs parallel to Goodramgate.  It is as desolate and quiet as Kings Square is deafening.  On the right is an interesting, squat little hall.  The windows have fine stone arches above and decorated tiles are interspersed for the length of the building.  Above the imposing central door is a small but wonderful mosaic.  And the other door is a thick steel one with signs warning 'CCTV Operating' and 'Trespassers Will Be Excommunicated.'  Like many of York's quirkier buildings, there are no clues about its function, past or present, and no entrance possible.  A little further down the road is the small St Andrews Evangelical Church, with nice perpendicular windows and ancient stone walls rather desperately shored up by brick.  Most minor historical buildings have one Fantastic Fact associated with them.  St Andrews' boast is that after being closed in the Reformation, it was temporarily converted into a brothel.  The street is by now divided into old buildings on the right and new ones on the left, staring across at one other in uneasy compromise.  The latter is part of the Aldwark/Bedern redevelopment initiated about fifteen years ago.  Formerly ghastly in every conceivable sense, the neighbourhood was razed and restocked with smart little houses and flats which are only ghastly in one sense.  This sets it apart from Walmgate, another old slum area which has not really scrubbed up much.  Turning right onto Aldwark, you walk past the side of the Oxfam building (high quality second hand clothes and books, remember, with a fine selection of Fair Trade Goods.  Make Poverty History Now!)  A little further along is the Merchants Taylors Hall, whose present incarnation dates back to the seventeenth century.  A brick lump of a place, dominated by a grey slate sloping roof and an ugly protruding left wing, it has none of the beauty of the Merchants Adventurers Hall on the southern curve of the Foss.  Maybe the Taylors should have been more Adventurous.

 Keep going and you soon see the charming grey tower of Hilary House, erstwhile home of the tax office.  Sadly, it is indicative of the part of town we are now entering.  More out of character is the Black Swan, directly across Peasholme Green as you exit Aldwark.  It is an impressive half-timber house with two (pointy front roof bits), black leaded windows and a slightly overhanging top floor.  An old manor house, it has been used as an inn since about 1763.  Inside the décor leans heavily towards oak beams, while the chief decorations are unsettling miniatures of stern priests and anaemic noblewomen.  There is also a strict hierarchy.  The back room is for ruddy-cheeked locals joking with the bar staff; the front room on the left for boisterous party groups; and the one on the right is frequented by bitter loners and depressed couples teetering on the verge of breakups.  The Black Swan can be surprisingly entertaining for such a Ye Olde place.  On one occasion we overheard a party of drunken lecturers declaring "I'll tell you who the biggest c**t in archaeology is!", making me reappraise all my views on the profession.  (I forget the actual name of the biggest c**t, though sadly it wasn't Tony Robinson.)  On another we were upbraided by a youth after discussing our entirely reasonable plan to dismember a teddy bear and post its fragments for the purposes of blackmail.  On that subject: one of the Black Swan's three ghosts is apparently a pair of disembodied shanks.  Nice to know that in this era of binge drinking the spectres, at least, are the very opposite of legless.

 Turn left upon leaving the Black Swan if you really must, though you may regret it.  Peasholme Green brings you into one of the city's unmentionable quarters, a land of large, grubby monoliths which perennially look on the verge of toppling down but never quite manage it.  The dreadfulness is not just due to neglect, however; they probably looked even worst when they were just built.  We are, of course, back into the 1960's and 70's here.  The towering gas headquarters is spectacular enough.  But the Stonebow Centre takes the breath away.  It is a sprawling, ungainly creature of needless ramps, illogical corridors and unrepentedly ugly concrete.  Though not especially huge it is one of those buildings which twice as large as it actually is, and three times as large as you would like it to be.  Like the Davygate Arcade (RIP, thank God), it was designed by a mindset which believed we would prefer shopping in shadowy passages rather than beautiful old streets.   Nearly every adult resident in York knows the Stonebow.  It is our Bullring, our Byker Wall, a shorthand for architecture at its most egregious and soulless.  We look upon it with horror, with revulsion – yet also with a little awe.  It serves as a dark undercurrent to an otherwise asinine novel and if it were ever bulldozered, the city would be a little more banal.  We would also lose our only half-way decent music venue, Fibbers, which hides in its skirts.

 On the other side of the road is a large and ancient shoe shop, Jones.  The building has a half-timbered effect on the first floor.  This allows us to fully appreciate the alarming extent to which it sags in the centre.  The hand of the Creator appears to have pressed on the roof and gently pushed.  It may be perfectly sound structurally, it may even be an intentional effect, but I'm sure their insurance premiums are mighty.  Close to the endangered Jones is the Building Which Epitomises York! (part 97).  Supersavers, a fine place to go for discount haberdashery and kitchenware.  From The Stonebow you enter a hideous cube of dark pebbledash.  Walk the considerable length of the shop, leave by the Fossgate door and turn.  What you have exited has suddenly become a fine old black and white house.  Of course, the explanation isn't that you went through a time warp somewhere around the 50p egg whisks.  Supersavers simply knocked two buildings into one.  But I do like the fact that two such dissimilar structures were even permitted to stand back-to-back, let alone nestle together like this; a harlot snuggling up to a queen.

 The short street of Fossgate is another haven of quirkiness.  There are model shops, art dealers, one of those second hand book sellers who only open when they feel like it and so very rarely do.  Perhaps the most distinctive place is Macdonalds, which has been a reasonable barometer of city centre trends.  It was originally a small cinema, in the days when small cinemas existed, and still has the fake Ionic columns to match.  A short life as a bingo hall followed before the takeover by the current owners, purveyors of over-priced furniture.  If it continues riding the wave of fashion I guess it'll soon become a mobile phone shop or a Starbucks; or perhaps a true McDonalds.  Cross the impractically quaint Fossgate Bridge and turn right down Merchantgate.  This takes you past the Red Lion, a fine pub to drink in providing you don't mind the fact that all regulars and staff will hate you and wish you harm.  I bore this for about five years, so show some backbone.  Besides, you will need a drink to fortify you.  You are about to enter Piccadilly.

 Piccadilly starts well.  Piccadilly starts with the Megazone.  A huge white edifice devoted to laser gaming.  "But," you're probably thinking here, "Wasn't laser gaming a mid-80's craze that lasted about five minutes?"  Well, yes, it was.  And the Megazone closed as soon as those five minutes ended.  Since then, though, the mysteries of urban planning have kept it standing, empty and most emphatically unloved.  In its defence, though, the innate vileness of the building is slightly mitigated by the trees which now grow from its roof and the regular sight of pigeons flying through its smashed windows.

 Piccadilly can't sustain this excellent beginning.  There does, however, seem to be some competition amongst its residents to be the most imposing and unpleasant.  Objectively, the two least appealing are the large car parks on the right hand side of the road.  But it's easy to look ugly if you're a car park.  It's what the things are there for.  (Oh, and I think people can park cars in them too.)  More effort is made by United House, a mysterious collection of offices.  A recent construction, it follows the trend of dark red brick, black window frames and tinted glass.  As always, the effect is as charming as having a black-suited bodyguard glare at you through his sunglasses.  It is, however, still better to be on the outside of United House looking in.  Tinted glass is a clever modern invention, a way of reducing all natural daylight to an unwholesome murk and allowing workers to experience Seasonal Affective Disorder all the year round.  My mum would probably want me to mention her tax office at this point.  But their current base of Swinson House is too small and bland to attract much attention amidst the strident awfulness of Piccadilly.  They should have stayed at Ryedale House, which stands glaring across the road.  Ryedale House is, inexplicably, supported on stilts.  The things to bear in mind when deciding if you want to walk anywhere near it are a) it was built in the 1960's and b) the general quality of 1960's concrete.  It also used to house a Job Centre.  Though I'm sure there's no truth in claims that the council were trying to get unemployment figures down by gathering all the city's jobseekers into one building and then letting it collapse on them.  Piccadilly signs off with a couple of extremely nasty looking hotels.  The name of one of them, Quality Hotel, might be ironic; though in fairness, they aren't indicating what level of quality they mean.  Judging by the exterior: it isn't good.  It isn't good at all.

 Mercifully, Piccadilly is finally terminated by the inner ring road.  Turn right here and swing across a dreadful roundabout.  Finally you will come, bloodied but alive and probably stronger in the soul from your ordeal, to the Eye of York.  This is the curious name for a circular open area which has Clifford's Tower at the centre and the Castle Museum on the periphery.  It is the secondary hub of tourism, the Minster of course being the primary one.  And proving that York is largely dictated by both our visitors and our history, it is another social focal point.  Parades and marches, for example, frequently begin around Clifford's Tower and terminate at the cathedral.  The Eye itself is somewhat bloodshot at the moment.  A huge car park sprawls across much of it, convenient but negating much of the aesthetic appeal of the tower.  One plan is therefore to replace the car park with another shopping centre; Coppergate Two, it's called, or Yet More Bloody Coppergate.  Some of us, though, wonder how submerging the place with a thousand more Vodephone boutiques will exactly improve matters.  So that debate is still rumbling on.

 If you're a child then you can run up the steep bank of Clifford's Tower, run down again and repeat.  I can't recommend this highly enough.  Adults can go inside the building but the appeal of this is more fleeting.  Clifford's Tower is just a small, circular fort, still intact but almost completely bare inside.  You can climb up onto the ramparts for the view, which is of course mostly of the car park, but do little else.  The tower is more important than it appears, however.  The motte was erected by William the Conqueror in 1068 to held guard the confluence of the rivers Foss and Ouse; the meeting which gave early York so much of its impetus.  The name derives from a certain Roger de Clifford, who ended up hung from chains from the tower after opposing Edward II in 1322.  The current structure dates back to the early fourteenth century.  The fate of the original tower is, I think, the reason why we've got almost no ethnic communities in York.

 In 1190 a nobleman called Richard de Malbis found himself in debt to a wealthy Jewish merchant.  He decided that starting a massacre would be cheaper than paying back his loan.  Following a fire in the city, he utilised the skewed reasoning of the time to incite a mob to attack the home of an agent of the merchant.  After killing the agent's widow and children, the mob turned their attentions to all Jews in the city, numbering about 150.  They fled to Clifford's Tower which was surrounded by the mob.  It was besieged for several days and finally set alight.  By the besieged, most probably, as the only escape from their persecutors.  With good reasoning too; the few who did run from the flames were torn apart.  Most of the Jews, though, burnt to death.

 There were other pogroms in London at much the same time; it was an era when scapegoats were often needed.  But York, always a much smaller place, became encircled by its reputation.  The city had sent out a message that outsiders weren’t welcome and it was heeded.  The Jews stayed away permanently.  So did the next wave of settlers, from the West Indies; likewise those from the Indian subcontinent.  There were other factors too, of course, notably a lack of heavy industry.  There has always been some need for cheap labour, though, and this is a city based on its openness to the world.  But not to those parts which are too different; not if they want to stay.  Very recently a Polish community has emerged and is growing quite quickly.  Perhaps after nine centuries the fire is finally going out.

 The Castle Museum takes up most of the perimeter of the Eye of York.  More than you initially think.  As befits an institution which has gradually taken over half the former civic buildings in the city, it sprawls somewhat.  It is also, though, rather invisible; a marked contrast to the small but strident Clifford's Tower.  Austere and pleasant enough if you focus on it, the chief building having a nicely fashioned tower and two jutting wings with semi-circular roofs, but with a tendency to slink into the background.  It is a strange effect for a complex which incorporates, amongst other things, two old prisons.  But as it houses the Castle Museum I can forgive it anything.  About the Castle Museum I can only say: go there.  Go there and stay as long as you need, your entire holiday if necessary.  It was founded by a philanthropist John Kirk as an attempt to preserve the dying traditions of the countryside.  Kirk would travel to remote farms buying broken mangles and ploughs off country folk who probably struggled to keep their faces straight.  This journal of ordinary life remains an important part of the Castle Museum and is perhaps its most innovative function.  One exhibit, for example, recreates kitchens through the ages.  This is fascinating until you find something from your childhood preserved in a museum, whereupon it grows rather depressing.  It's not the only aspect to the Castle Museum, however.  There is a lengthy piece on the Siege of York during the English Civil War.  There's a dimly lit gallery of ancient and fragile ball gowns.  There are recreations of two old streets complete with carriages and foul-smelling sweet shops.  There's a chance to sit in a genuine condemned man's cell, should you really want to  There are two amazingly tasteless and still-operational coin-operated clockwork toys with depict a hanging and an Uncle Tom Minstrels' Show.  The Castle Museum appears to be the product of several battling curators with widely differing interests, none of whom can gain total supremacy.  That's why you should go there.

 Tower Street will take you from the Eye of York back to the town centre.  It featured prominently in national news reports about the Great Floods of 2000.  I remember a (naturally balanced and unsensational) BBC broadcaster standing in the inundated road and implying that the whole city centre was submerged.  It wasn't, of course.  The journalist never mentioned that Tower Street actually runs very close to the river Ouse, or touched on the traffic whizzing quite unconcerned over the roundabout behind him.  What basically happened was that he put his wellies on and found a puddle to stand in.  Anyway, apart from several thousand restaurants, Tower Street holds the fire station, which is a large but inconspicuous building, and the Magistrates' Court, which isn't.  All northern cities were given a few edifices like the Magistrates' Court in the nineteenth century, presumably to remind them that we are not put on this earth for pleasure alone.  The Court has the inevitable statue of the blindfolded woman holding a pair of scales.  She is stuck quite high up, however, and eclipsed by some frankly baffling gargoyles.  It also has a great grey clock tower, a couple of asymmetrical and onion-domed lantern towers, a horrendous tiled portico and lines of stone window frames shoved violently into a red brick building.  The architect seems to have taken whatever he liked in ecclesiastical and civic architecture and thrown them all together.  As a tribute presumably, though it ends up an almost breathtaking series of parodies.  I've never been inside the Magistrates' court on any business.  The exterior is enough though.  If the price of crime is having to look at this thing repeatedly, I'll be good.  Directly across the road, incidentally, are the much smaller offices of Crombie Wilkinson solicitors.  The blue painted façade, and in particular the railings of the first floor balcony, are a lesson in quiet elegance.  They may not have intended it as a polite rebuke to the Court, but that's what comes across.

 A terrace almost as monstrous as the Court curls down much of Tower Street.  An especially baroque set of entrance doors gives ingress to the Gallery, possibly York's best nightclub.  Go there some time and muse on what the rest of them must be like.  Even then, you'll probably be too generous.  Some even more gruesome sights can be found next door, in the York Dungeon.  This is a spin-off of the larger London Dungeon and rests on the same curious premise.  Namely, that waxworks of beheadings, hangings, quarterings, boilings and various other methods for dismantling the human body are not only suitable for children, they are actually rather jolly.  There is creepy lighting and taped screams a-plenty inside, but also a jaunty tone to the commentaries which encourage us to laugh at the heretic being thrown into the cauldron of oil.  And the Dungeons emerged during the mid-80's 'video nasty' panic, when any film showing the slightest flesh wound was assumed to be turning our children into sociopathic murderers.  As a bloodthirsty young teenager myself, I could only applaud them.  I had to lie outrageously about my age to see any of the Friday the 13ths.  By going to the York Dungeon, I could see far worst sights and practically get extra school credit.

 A number of little roads lead from Tower Street to the river.  All are worth a quick exploration, being an interesting cross between ordinary street and back alley.  Cumberland Street holds the York Opera House.  This opened about fifteen years ago, originally intended to be a serious rival to the Theatre Royal.  It started quite well, artistically as well as commercially.  There was even the occasional opera.  It seems to be in a decline nowadays, though, and offer programmes filled with the likes of Roy 'Chubby' Brown and Joe Pasquale.  Personally I preferred the Empire, the fantastically old fashioned venue which used to stand around here.  It was no better in general but did offer bouts of that almost-vanished 'sport', British wrestling.  Many happy evenings were spent with my dad watching unfit, obese middle-aged men perpetrate carefully choreographed bellyflops upon each other.  Further down Cumberland Street, meanwhile, is the Lowther.  This is one of those pubs which you stop drinking in as soon as you turn eighteen.

 (to be finished)

 Colliergate brings you back into Kings Square.  The Shambles still looms, but it's remarkable what alternatives you can find when threatened with the Shambles.  Here I recommend a short alley which quickly takes you into the market.  This has taken to calling itself Newgate Market nowadays.  To me, though, it's always just been The Market – or if you can manage the accent, 'T'Market.'  A simple name for a simple place.  There is none of the beauty of Leeds' enclosed market here, none of the fascinating specialities of some of the London ones.  It is just an open space where you can purchase cheaply the basic necessities of life – locally grown potatoes and carrots, fish from Scarborough and Hull, Bing Crosby CD's at 50p a pop, posters of Homer Simpson showing his bottom.  Overshadowing it is a Marks & Spencers, a useful reminder of why you should buy as much from the market as possible.  Closer to on your right is a row of old whitewashed houses.  The striped pole of a barber's shop is still attached to one even though the barber, and indeed everyone else, departed the place long ago.  Just around the corner on Patrick Pool is Ernest Roy.  It is an interesting combination of modern and traditional, a shop for electrical goods run as a haberdashery or button seller would once have been.  The wares on display are a hopeless jumble of cables and transformers; your only hope of finding anything is to ask the proprietor.  He will shake his head dubiously, spend some time criticising the vagueness of your specifications and then produce exactly what you need.

 Carry on past the market and you soon come into Parliament Street.  A wide road with two separated lanes, it is a relatively new development and clearly designed for traffic.  Nowadays it should have become somewhere which drivers roar down with impunity, flattening domestic animals and making rude gestures at the cowering shoppers.  Another Trafalgar Square, basically.  But since pedestrianisation has banned from the city centre all traffic except delivery vans, buses and taxis– i.e. the sort of vehicles most likely to enter anyway – Parliament Street has become a kind of social centre.  I've already mentioned the frequent Bolivian buskers.  Equally likely to be found amidst the fountains are Boy Scout brass bands, anti-vivisection petitioners, Sky TV road shows and misanthropes playing bagpipes.  (An instrument which always sounds out of key even when it isn't.)  A mini-fun fair sets up every December, pretty much constituting the start and end of York's Christmas decorations.  Sometimes there are art and craft stalls, local Farmers' Markets or continental fairs.  Most are welcome, though occasionally a group of Bavarians invade the whole street.  Despite our taste for Bavarian goods – beer and sausages, basically – being quickly sated, they stay for months and we usually have to pay them a lot of money before they agree to leave.

 Two rows of trees run down the middle of Parliament Street.  Walk between them so you won't have to look too closely at the architecture.  A Barclays demonstrates the odd habit of banks for taking over unusually elaborate, baroque buildings.  The HSBC proves not all have this knack; and their grim, featureless monument is more typical of the street.  Walk smartly past the public toilets, no matter how desperate you are – unless you enjoy the smell and touch of stale urine – and at the end of the street turn down High Ousegate.  The chief feature of this is the All Saints' church.  Ancient in origin, though gradually rebuilt over the centuries so little of the original structure remains, it holds the dubious honour of housing 39 ex-Lord Mayors.  But its most striking feature is an unusual octagonal lantern tower.  Supposedly once used as a beacon for lost travellers, I suspect it was mainly to help the sound of All Saints' bells pierce the minds of those living nearby and hopefully drag a few more into the pews.  If you're a lesser church in the domain of the Minster, you get a little desperate.  Walking past All Saints' takes you onto Coppergate.  Worth and aesthetics are a little muddled up here.  A spectacularly hideous edifice contains a fine stationery shop, while a beautiful early twentieth century stone building is quite unjustly habitated by a Habitat.  But you probably associate Coppergate with something else.  So we may as well carry on, onto Coppergate Square – technically St Mary's Square though nobody calls it that – and get it over with.

 Coppergate has played an important part in York's recent history.  When the area was dug up for a shopping centre in the nearly 1980's, they came across a great trove of Viking artefacts.  It had long been known that the city was a capital of the Viking kingdom established in north-east England in the ninth century.  Not how to market this fact, though, or even how to prove it especially well.  But the finds gave our tourist industry, hitherto overly reliant on the Minster and the Bar Walls, a great opportunity.  Up rushed the Jorvik Centre in Coppergate, an internationally renowned museum which eclipsed the new shops.  The Jorvik Centre also played a key role in a rethinking of the Vikings which was coming into fashion.  Namely, that the stuff about them being bloodthirsty marauders hacking across the countryside with double-headed axes was a myth.  They were peaceful farmers and fishermen like everyone else.  In the Jorvik Centre you could see recreations of them just getting on with normal life.

 My first view of this reassessment is that it's not, in fact, true.  The Viking raids were a phenomenon which unbalanced all northern Europe with their intense ferocity.  They hit Britain, Ireland, France, Ireland, even Spain, pillaging towns and selling the inhabitants into slavery.  And they kept coming.  After they had grabbed large swathes of coastal regions they may have settled down a little.  But that was just a case of conquerors becoming peaceful because they had successfully conquered.  Secondly, the only reason why we still care about the Vikings is because they had horned helmets, longships and people with names like Eric Bloodaxe.  Without these trappings they would have quickly faded into the murk of the Dark Ages along with the Picts, the Angles and the rest.  Like those people, their whole cultural and technological achievements can be summed up in three words: "some nice metalwork."

 You will probably visit the Jorvik Centre regardless but I must warn you, it does rather show this strain.  It was genuinely thrilling when it opened in 1984.  Great queues snaked all around the square, standing beside dispiriting signs telling them how many hours they still had to wait.  When finally inside, though, it was worth the delay.  The little carts which carried you through the recreated village, the realism of the waxworks, the seemingly authentic soundtrack.  And above all else, the odours.  "It smells like shit!" we would beam at school the next day.  We had never been to a museum which smelled like shit before.  But though there are still few which do, many others have matched and surpassed the Jorvik Centre in terms of eye-catching, child-friendly stunts.  It has a slightly forlorn air nowadays, especially since a rather desperate refit a few years ago.  All the gimmicks seem designed to hide the fact that there were never actually all that many decent artefacts found and most that were have been loaned to other museums.

 (to be finished)

 Spurriergate always reminds me of a novel by William Golding.  A bishop in medieval times orders a ridiculously high spire to be built onto his cathedral.  Supposedly for the glory of God, but really for the fame he himself will accrue from it.  Whoever designed St Michael's Church on Spurriergate was of precisely the opposite bent.  He was ordered to include a spire, one assumes, because that's what all churches in the 12^th century had.  But he clearly didn't like the things.  So he built perhaps the smallest one in the whole of Christendom, setting it well back from the façade for good measure.  From the right angles, in a good light, you can just about sense that the thing is there.  Golding's spire ended up collapsing under its own weight and destroying the cathedral.  The other extremity was almost as cataclysmic; St Michael's is no longer consecrated and has become the rather mysterious Spurriergate Centre.  Opposite it now is a row of shops which seemed even more ambitious, judging from the time it took to build them.  What finally emerged from the scaffolding, though, were the architectural equivalent of flat-pack furniture from MFI.  They house software dealers and fashion boutiques and that seems about right.

 Spurriergate quickly becomes Coney Street, York's main high street.  The experts may be right in stating that city centres are gradually being sucked dry by edge-of-town malls, even that conventional shops are doomed in these internet days. Still, though, observe Coney Street on a Saturday afternoon, especially close to Christmas.  Don't try to do anything more ambitious, however.  Such as, for example, moving. The hub of the crush is close beside Spurriergate, outside Woolworth's and WH Smiths; a constant swirl of harried people wandering through the open doors, wondering what the hell there is to actually buy in Woolworth's and WH Smiths and wandering out again.  Most of the other usual suspects can be found on Coney Street and the sights above shop level are no more original.  For the main; but gaze above Boots and you will be startled by what appears to be a Tudor mansion, complete with laughing jesters' heads.  It breaks up the monotony nicely, though I'm not sure the sick and frail should be welcomed into a chemists by a load of cackling faces.  Another row of old houses can be found further along, one holding a shop which offers 'herbal acupuncture.'  Most of York's 'natural remedies' pushers can be found in this little line, all selling a mixture of lentils, vitamin substitutes for people who eat nothing but lentils and scary looking tubs for bodybuilders.  It's a familiar pattern amongst some retailers.  They tend to cluster together, seemingly for protection.  Each gains strength and confidence from their peers.  Finally one finds enough audacity to advertise something like herbal acupuncture.

 Opposite this nonsense is an opening leading to an impressive new development by the Ouse.  The nucleus is the former home of a long departed and forgotten newspaper called the Yorkshire Herald.  The York Evening Press owned the property for a long while but then moved out to Walmgate.  During the 1980's of course, a time when all worthwhile newspapers had to shift premises even if, as with the Press, the relocation made little sense.  For a long time the Herald building mouldered and the whole area became a centipede-infested wilderness.  But about half a decade ago it was turned into a striking example of how to do a renovation: keep the changes subtle, retain the character of the old structures. The Herald building is actually best appreciated from across the Ouse.  Most striking from Coney Street is the City Screen.  This has become one of our rare artistic successes.  Originally a kind of film club operating from a shed in the Museum Gardens, it trod the line between arthouse and mainstream so dextrously that it was able to expand into a proper cinema.  The critical might say the new building still resembles a shed, just a very big one.  The façade is essentially a series of huge planks nailed together and seems like something which would be more at home in the Canadian wilderness.  I quite like it though.  The Canadians may be tired of this design but there's nothing else quite like it in York.  More damningly, the rest of the little complex is devoted to the usual annoying cafes and bars.  And one is called Orgasmic.  A name which is bad on so many levels that you would need a complex spreadsheet to log them all.

 Eventually Coney Street terminates at St Helen's Square.  This holds the Lord Mayor's House, a big, jolly, brash building for big, jolly brash Mayors.  (Like Dave Horton, for example, the incumbent a few years ago and a former work colleague of mine, a man who could challenge Geoff Boycott for the title of most Yorkshire Yorkshireman alive.)  Continue past it, go down Lendal and you get to more places for making people fat and/or drunk.  Ones, moreover, with ideas above their station.  Varsity, for example, a name designed to conjure up images of Oxbridge students throwing bread rolls at each other.  God knows why you might want that, but you don't get it anyway; Varsity is just the usual loud music and sofas and over-crowding combo.  Judges Lodgings, across the road, is at least based in a rather grandiose mansion house but I bet there's no proof of any judges ever having lodged there.  They would have to be quite stupid ones if they had; the law courts are right on the other side of town.  Lendal Cellars, standing just off St Helen's Square, is at least more honest.  They are indeed based underground.  You do get to drink in a noisy and rather rank cellar.  And that is as pleasant as it sounds.  Lendal, though, is also a haven for shops which have survived for an improbable length of time.  Banks, for example, who have been allegedly selling instrument and sheet music since the reign of George III.  Robson & Cooper too, retailing luggage from the era when the only foreign travellers were intrepid aristocrats doing the Grand Tour of Italy and the Alps.  And Games Workshop, who have been peddling lead orcs to teenage geeks from Lendal for far too long.  (Not to me, I'm glad to say: Games Workshop were in Goodramgate when I was a teenage geek.)  Also to be found here is a little booth which isn't interesting or historical in any way but do make the best sandwiches in town.  So now you know.

 (to be finished)

 St Leonards Place holds another of York's more celebrated sights – an arrogantly elegant, curving cream terrace.  It was built in Georgian times when the transport boom had given the city a fair bit of money.  Taken over by the council since, it has been allowed to get rather grubby because we don't really have much money any more.  Looming on the other side of the road is the Theatre Royal.  For a provincial theatre in a somewhat sleepy town, this isn't too bad.  As well as being the domain of Berwick Kaler – of whom more later – it has managed some decent productions and the occasional important one.  For example David Hare chose to premiere The Permanent Way, his snide attack on the privatised railway system, in this appropriate venue.  The interior is pleasingly archaic too.  The fusty atmosphere and curving rows of battered seats give the auditorium the air of a music hall, evoking nostalgia even for those of us far too young to remember music halls.  The Theatre Royal, though, is a curious sight from the street.  The current façade dates back to 1835 and looks it.  With its mini-cloister, its grandiloquent statues and numerous other unnecessary flourishes, it is yet another secular building pretending to be a church.  Bulging out of one end , though, is the ultra-modern glass dome of a foyer stuck on haphazardly at a much later date.  Think Coventry Cathedral if it had gone horribly wrong and you have the Theatre Royal.

 St Leonards Place opens out into Exhibition Square.  They have fixed the fountains in the square nowadays which is rather a shame.  In my youth it was a creature of random whims.  On the way into town I used to enjoy trying to predict which nozzles would be emitting vast torrents of water, which feeble trickles and which would have given up entirely.  A statue of William Etty, the early nineteenth century painter, stands amidst the fountains.  Behind them is the art gallery.  Externally at least, York Art Gallery is a grim warning of what happens when you let an unimaginative neo-classical pile go to rack and ruin.  Two fainted murals just beneath the roof are probably intended to give it a more authentic Roman air but only make it look even more seedy.  It is not much more impressive inside but is worth a quick visit.  Especially since a recent refit kicked out all the paintings actually by William Etty.  This is a bit hard on Etty, who was one of the prime forces behind the building of the gallery.  But nobody who has been assaulted by his voluptuous half-naked women and their enormous knockers will miss him.  Our chief contribution to world art is something of an embarrassment.  Bradford can boast David Hockney, Leeds the marvellously Victorian Atkinson Grimshaw.  We have Etty, whose style could be called rococo or proto-Pre-Raphaelite, but is really just badly disguised pornography.

 Also rearing over Exhibition Square is Bootham Bar, one of the most extensive of the gateways.  Walk past it and you are in Gillygate.  This is York's foremost Quirky Street, a place for people to live their dreams.  Arty types chuck their day jobs and try to make a living selling their hobbies in Gillygate.  Six months later they are gone again, having failed to find a market for ceramic wind charms or rugs hand-woven from goat pubes.  The street never becomes desolate, though, because there are always more romantics ready to learn about capitalism the tough way.  Even two of the more durable residents have gone in the past year – Cassidys, a fine second hand record shop, and The Little Soldier, which sold those little lead figures.  Both had their faults – the stench of Cassidys' carpets knocked over passers-by even when the shop door was closed, The Little Soldier catered for geeks – but it was sad to see them go.  A bakers suffered from a different sort of affliction.  A man was once murdered in the flat above.  The body was only discovered when 'unidentified liquids' started dripping through the ceiling onto the shop floor.  Said liquids just proved to be from an overflowing sink, but I and most others never bought a bun in there again.  One stalwart which I dearly wish would vanish is a doll shop tucked in by Bootham Bar.  Hundreds of the things sit in the window.  Their dead eyes stare out at you without blinking and it takes a brave soul to walk past alone at night.  More cheering is a porn shop half-way down.  It seems standard fare from the outside except for the sign, which is painted in that absurd mock-antique font.  They might just as well have called it Ye Olde Pornne Shoppe.  Only in York etc.  I've never been inside so I can't report whether or not they have the evicted William Ettys.

 If Goodramgate's buildings are ridiculously varied in styles, Gillygate are so physically.  Each side of the road is more or less a single terrace but made of all sorts of houses just rammed together.  There are tall ones, short ones, fat ones, thin ones and a couple of rather unstable looking ones.  The enigmatically named Collection is a single-story structure which should be totally overshadowed by its neighbours, except that its a great pyramid roof pumps up its height artificially.  (any more??)  Ending the street is a late nineteenth century Salvation Army headquarters.  General Booth's soldiers clearly had more than spiritual enemies to fear when designing this.  A dull brick fortress, it could probably resist a middling size siege.

 Gillygate transforms into Clarence Street.  On the corner with Lord Mayors Walk is a sports centre belonging to the nearby College of Ripon & St John.  It is a new structure in both creation and design, all plate glass windows and gentle curves.  Whenever I walk past, I always have the nagging feeling that it could look truly great if only I could find the right place to view it from.  This elusive vantage point is probably the artist's impression which stood on the board up front while the slightly disappointing reality was being erected.  Clarence Street is by and large a mundane little road.  I have only dragged you out this far because half way down is the best chip shop in York.  Not the most famous.  That's a place on Petergate where you wait for half an hour and pay two pounds for a tiny bag full of pus.  But the Clarence Street emporium sell the best.  Modestly priced, just the right amount of grease and, most importantly, not tasting at all of potato.  The only drawback is that if you time your visit wrong, you have to queue behind a hundred jolly pensioners from the Conservative Club across the road.  Anyway, unless you have eaten some fish (or heard some political opinions) which make you need the services of the nearby hospital, you may as well turn around and head back.

 (to be finished)

 Micklegate rises up a gentle incline.  Half of the street is cobbled.  Even after they give way to a more sensible surface, many of the houses are ancient and perhaps leaning forward more than they should.  Part way alone is The Parish.  This used to be a church which later became the York Arts Centre, the domain of old men in Arran pullovers and earnest Northumbrian pipers.  Folk musicians fared no better than God on the site, however, and the Arts Centre finally expired after a decades-long death.  The Parish is mostly a standard modern bar, with needlessly loud music and bar stools everywhere except beside the bar.  Fortunately the renovation left the church exterior, the windows and the interior ceilings intact.  In certain places you really do seem to be getting pissed in a chapel – a surprisingly uplifting sensation.  Looming over the whole street is Micklegate Bar, a tall, solid gateway topped by more curiously minute statues.  These are still preferable to its previous items of decoration – the severed heads of traitors.  Richard Duke of York, in 1461, was the most famous resident but others include Sir William Plumpton and Lord Scrope.  Men with names that marvellous, I feel, deserved a better fate.

 Fitting in with this medieval ambience is the tradition of heavy drinking.  The Micklegate Run and its more accurate and alternative, the Micklegate Crawl, have both entered local parlance.  The reputation is largely deserved.  Every weekend sees large gangs of girls wearing too few clothes exchanging catcalls with packs of youths with too little hair.  Oddly enough, though, there aren't many truly dreadful pubs on Micklegate itself.  Harry's Bar is to be avoided if you cherish your sanity but the Windmill and the Punchball, both close to Micklegate Bar, are decent enough.  Most of the worst culprits are round the corner on Rougier Street.  McMillans and Nexus, the 'fun pubs'; if your idea of fun is being jammed in with thousands of drunks looking for a fight.  Or the 80's retro bar Reflex, where the above conditions apply but also include getting deafened by Johnny Hates Jazz and Curiosity Killed The Cat.  If Hell proves to be anything different, it will only be an improvement.

 (to be finished)

 On the right of Toft Green are some fine wrought iron gates leading to the pedestrian area in front of the GNER headquarters.  Running up the street are iron railings of the same vintage, protecting the small line of trees standing alongside the untidy sprawl of railway-related offices nowadays called the City Business Centre.  Don't stare at them too intently, however.  The other side of the road holds Tofts, York's second worst nightclub, and its patrons often decorate the pavement with vomit.  And coming into sight now is Hudson House.  Hudson House really has to be seen to be believed.  It was named after George Hudson; as is a nearby street where the chief fun comes from trying to dodge homicidal buses.  He deserves better.  Hudson was a key player in the development of the railways in the nineteenth century and one of York's greatest figures.  He was a superb opportunist and a magnificent crook – a sort of combination of Bill Gates and Kenneth Lay.  Through a mixture of propaganda and bribery he developed the track network across the whole north east, and by the mid 1840's controlled about a third of the country's amusingly unregulated railways.  All his companies, though, were built on a vast amount of debt and the assumption that at some unspecified time he would be able to clear it all.  Just one more purchase, one more railway line, he seemed to think, and everything would be resolved.  Not entirely surprisingly, the strategy didn't work.  His whole empire imploded in late 1840's.  Though Hudson corrupted enough politicians to cover up all his past political corruptions, he eventually spent a year in a part of the Castle Museum.  Which doesn't sound too bad, except that it was then still the Debtor's Prison.

 Hudson House, admittedly, does have some splendour in its own unique way.  It is a big, bleak asymmetrical lump and entirely free of any adornment.  And it is made of brown concrete.  It is this detail which gives the building the feel of an evil genius at work.  Dark brown concrete.  Some places need to be viewed in clear, bright sunshine to optimise their qualities.  To fully appreciate Hudson House, you need to behold it on a drizzly November afternoon.  Amazingly, the place won an award; a proper one too, we assume, not one of those Hull/Crap Towns ones.  In the 1960's, presumably, whose chief legacy of radical politics seems to be a scattering of Stalinist monoliths.  Hudson House is, admittedly, quite pleasant to work in.  After all, if you're inside it then you don't have to look at it.  Fortunately not all of the City Business Centre is like Hudson House.  The complex has grown organically and holds a wide range of buildings from the past hundred and fifty years.  One segment, West Offices, was once the original York Station.  The platforms still exist though now just stand over a car park.  Just past Hudson House is a narrow structure with some sort of funnel welded onto it.  It may be a stairway, may be a chimney or may just be a piece of architectural insanity.  The top three quarters are of far newer brick than the rest of the building, as if they started work on it, decided it looked silly and later realised it looked far sillier incomplete.  Next door is the imposing new George Stephenson House, chiefly notable as a symbol of a steep corporate rise-and-fall arc.  The egregious Jarvis commissioned it when they were at their zenith at the start of the century, hoovering up railway and school construction projects.  The bubble kind of burst when people realised they weren't any good at anything they did.  Now their shares sell for tuppence-ha'penny (with enough change for the bus fare home), they are contracting brutally, their directors are awarding themselves vast Incompetency Bonuses and they have relocated to a nice two-up-two-down in Meridian Crescent.  Network Rail stepped into their former headquarters (which are wonderfully designed, incidentally, so presumably not done so by Jarvis themselves).  They aren't much good at what they do either, but are shored up by the government so don't have to be.

 Follow Toft Green onto Micklegate and double back a little.  Priory Street opens on the right.  Priory Street is perhaps the holiest road in York.  Not only is there a fine gym where you can learn to kick people in the head, there are many places where you can repent afterwards.  The first is the Baptist Church, a fairly standard for any religion who considers a steeple to be the Devil's penis.  By contrast, on the other side of the road is a great towering slab of dark brick, the only nods to conventional ecclesiastical architecture being the stained glass in its tall windows.  Doubtless it started life as some sort of civic centre, but now it glories in the magnificent name Rock Church.  "If you are religious, you probably won't like us," their website boasts, and the stern, bold setting does fire the imagination.  I see it as a place where worshippers are assaulted every Sunday by Nick Cave-esque ballads of dark sin and brutal vengeance.  But I've never visited, afraid of disillusionment.  Aside from gospel, Christianity and pop don't mix well.  Think Cliff Richard, think Boney M.  And I always think of a Christian Union meeting at university.  Where they showed a cartoon of the Crucifixion accompanied by Bryan Adams' Everything I Do I Do It For You.  My break from organised religion began that evening.

 Another structure which is more hall than chapel, albeit more refined and modest, belongs to a group called the United Reformed Church, who appear to be something of an SDP Liberal Alliance type movement.  Round the corner onto Bishophill and you get to St Mary's Church.  The street narrows into St Martins Lane, home of a fine little pub called the Ackhorne.  I first went there long ago at a slightly illegal age after a Socialist Workers meeting, the only worthwhile thing they did introduce me to.  Back then it was simply the Acorn and as busy as you'd expect from a pub down a dark alley.  But its adoption of an incorrect spelling of its name has helped trade immensely.  Now it is full of loud students telling loud jokes.  The Socialist Workers may still be sat in a corner somewhere, grumbling about today's apathetic youth.  Oh, and past the Ackhorne is another church.

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