A sort of tourist-cum-architectural-cum-whatever guide to my home city. Most was written 2004-5. This explains some of the anachronisms e.g. almost all the buildings I complain about in Peasholme Green now being naught but piles of rubble. One day I may go through and update the thing. One day, God willing, I may even finish the thing.

Introduction

  An unspoken secret about York is that the Bar Walls are, by and large, rubbish.  Even if we ignore the fact that they frequently peter out half-heartedly, forcing you to walk through numerous grubby streets to the next bit.  Or that they are a product not of Viking warlords but sentimental Victorians.  More important is that the views from them are frequently ludicrous for a tourist attraction.  Only two stretches run between sights of conventional beauty.  The first is between Bootham Bar and Monkbar, along the backs of decorative ecclesiastical gardens.  It played host to one of the few genuinely Dennis the Menace-esque parts of my childhood, when me and Graeme 'Grotter' Pottor dropped into a garden only to be caught by a gnarled gamekeeper who all-but prodded us with a pitchfork while escorting us from the property.  But there is beauty there even for those with no such memories, with fine ancient mansions visible beyond the gardens.  The second worthy segment runs parallel to Station Avenue.  The sight of the walls tumbling towards the river, Lendal Bridge and the Minster in the background, is one of the most famous views of York.  Even then, though, one must develop tunnel vision to avoid the sprawl of office buildings on the right.  The GNER headquarters are pleasant enough, though you may wonder why the elegant stone decorations have been bolted onto a brick building.  But there are also, in ascending order of dreadfulness, the bright citadel which is the new Norwich Union building, the dark lump which is the old Norwich Union building and the extended nightmare which is Hudson House.

 As to the rest of the walls…. turn east instead of west at Micklegate Bar and there is the slightly picturesque backs of the Priory Street houses to one side, the less-than picturesque Nunnery Lane car park to the other.  Things get a little nicer after a sharp turn northwards but then you are unceremoniously dumped next to the grotesque yuppie flats beside the Ouse.  To rejoin the walls you need to somehow cross the roundabout in front of the Castle Museum designed by men who hate pedestrians.  And from there you get views of the inner ring road, the monument of the living dead which is the Barbican Centre and the gaping maw of Hull Road.  So it goes on.  The Bar Walls themselves look very nice from almost any vantage point.  What you frequently see from them, however, is a York which is old, prosaic and slightly grubby.

 This, despite my throwaway opening sentence, is a good thing.  Both that York is sometimes grubby and that visitors get to see this side.  Because the place is simply more interesting away from its carefully preserved historic enclaves, its black and white houses peddling tourist pap.  It has black and white houses which peddle ultra-modern pap too.  It has buildings from ten different epochs which simply don't belong near each other.  It has a few which surely don't belong anywhere.  It has sights which are beautiful, horrendous, exasperating or simply baffling; and it has a promise that it will continue to spew others out.  Kate Atkinson, in her otherwise excellent novel Behind The Scenes At The Museum, said her home city was in 'a strange, listless limbo <where> the past is so crowded that it sometimes feels as if there is no room for the living.'  Perhaps that's what you conclude if you set a book in High Petergate, literally in the shadows of the Minster.  If she hadn't run off to Edinburgh as quickly as she could, Atkinson might have noticed the living are very frequently in open warfare with the past and quite often winning.  (Take the current Battle Over The Battle of Fulford, too long and dull to go into here but basically yet another conflict between the mighty armies of Developers and Archaeologists).  York is a contemporary city heading in about five different directions at once, at least two of them bad and two more making very little sense.

 I'm not pretending it's unique.  Everywhere has its idiosyncrasies if you look carefully enough.  Sometimes they can come from the juxtaposing of old and new, sometimes from whimsies which aren't checked in time.  Everywhere, no matter how small, grim or modern.  A microscopic hamlet in Wales I once visited has a hut which pretty much a whole meadow growing on the roof, looking suspiciously like a hobbit hole.  In an almost universally bleak town like Luton there is still a crumbling but pioneering shopping arcade with oddly beautiful papier mache flamingos.  York, though, has nearly two thousand of history rammed together inside and outside of its famous walls.  It has never been planned, or at least never planned very well.  And it is testament that the best places never are, but emerged gradually from the idiots and geniuses who live there.

(to be finished)

 

 The Minster and Its Domain

 The Minster dominates York.  The two words fit together instinctively.  Say 'York' to an outsider and the likelihood is that the cathedral will automatically rise in their mind; like peaches and cream, like Hale and Pace.  It features prominently in every lazy guidebook to Britain, every hackneyed image.  York City FC are even nicknamed the Minster Men, not really a name to inspire terror in rival fans or, for that matter, enthusiasm in our own.  (It is almost a relief that our annoying mascot is a lion rather than a rubber, prancing basilica.)  Only through the Minster can we claim to be England's second city, albeit in the rather odd structure which has Canterbury as the first.

In fact, the site of the Minster has dominated York before it was built; before York was even York or even Jorvic.  The cathedral was built on roughly the same spot as a Roman legionary fortress.  And around the fortress, built in AD71 as part of the attempt to subdue the north and control the highways following the gradual conquest in the first century, grew the soldiers' quarters.  And around them developed the markets, the other, ahem, 'supply services,' the whole kernel of what is now modern York.  We wouldn't exist were it not for what was plonked on that sandstone plateau between the Foss and the Ouse.  Strangely enough, our Roman founders have been largely ignored in favour of the Vikings – one of history's duller cultures after they abandoned the longboats and the double-headed axes.  The only traces on easy view are a few oddities which somehow escaped the wrecking balls – the quixotic Multangular Tower, a pillar standing close to the Minster in bizarre isolation.

 Some belated recognition has been given in the form of the Constantine statue opposite the pillar.  It was erected about ten years ago but cunningly designed to age rapidly so now looks like something excavated from an ancient tomb.  The great emperor is reclining on a seat looking, shall we say, like Kenneth Williams' Julius Caesar.  The plinth declares that he was proclaimed Emperor on approximately the site in 306.  Well, in a way he was.  He wasn't actually crowned there.  He was just declared Emperor by his troops, probably after a lively night out.  This sort of thing happened a lot in late Imperial days.  Whenever something of a vacuum appeared in the Eternal City, the soldiers of any halfway competent general would announce him to be the new top man.  And they would murder him as soon as it became clear that they wouldn't get away with it.  For that matter, Constantine hadn't even done anything when his nomination came up – it was his father, Constantius, who had.  Even after Constantine became an official Emperor, he wasn't in control of the full Empire at first.  Rome at the time was ruled by a sort of committee of four or five, each one being responsible for a slice.  Only after betraying and murdering his colleagues did the first Christian, God-fearing Emperor win control of the whole lot.  Then he promptly moved to a city as far from York as was practically possible.  But I digress.

 On a flat plain like the one York is built on, the buildings all compete on an equal footing.  The tallest wins.  And the Minster, unbelievably, is still the highest building in York.  Not just within the city walls – inside the whole modern boundary.  For a time it was outdone by the chimney of the Redfearn glassworks.  This caused a great deal of outrage and numerous spluttering letters to the York Evening Press.  But when the factory closed, the chimney was demolished by a pack of locals wielding mallets and pitchforks and the Minster regained its supremacy.  This is indicative of attitudes here.  It's not that we turn our back on progress – we aren't, thank God, somewhere like Knaresborough or Robin Hoods Bay.  But we always take modernity in a loose grip, ready to let go when it produces something we disapprove of.  And there are so so many things we disapprove of in York.

 The reach of the Minster cannot be truly appreciated standing right beside it.  Do just that, of course.  Stand in College Street by the half-timbered St Martin's College and… Well, actually all you'll get from there is the hypnotic appeal of the hundreds of feet of scaffolding which forever cover the Minster's eastern face.  Circle round, though, gazing up at the beautiful Rose Window, rebuilt after being wrecked in the 1982 fire.  Stand in Minster Yard and look at the spectacular main doors, the sounds of rehearsing choir boys filtering out in early morning to entertain us profane drones hurrying to work.  Gaze up and up, wondering where the hell the huge main tower actually ends.  Be overwhelmed by the sheer oppressive detail, the ceaseless decorations and carvings, many of them too high and remote to ever be seen properly by mortals; because this is a building designed to be viewed from heaven, literally, as well as from earth.  And wonder just how the eleventh century, a chaotic era ridiculously impoverished in almost every conceivable way, ever produced something like this.  And then produced it again in the twelfth century (which wasn't much better) when the first version burnt down.

 Any large building, though, can look impressive from its very foot.  To appreciate the Minster's grip on the city, you need to travel further afield.  Out past the sprawl of libraries and schools which have sprouted up around the cathedral.  Try taking a walk down Layerthorpe, for example.  Layerthorpe is one of York’s periodic attempts to impersonate a grim, semi-derelict Yorkshire industrial town.  These impersonations can be quite convincing at times.  The atmosphere both bustling and forlorn, a district full of people who don't want to stay there.  Crumbling old car dealerships are fighting a rearguard action against the soulless 'exclusive new executive flats' being spewed up by Barretts.  Very probably you will hear a siren wailing.  Turn around half-way down Layerthorpe, however.  The sight is startling.  Past the crumbling corpse of the old gas works, above the weary red tile roofs, looming over an area which has to be godlessness incarnate… the Minster.

 And keep going, down East Parade, right onto Melrosegate, pushing further and further east.  Right out into Tang Hall.  This is what used to be called a council estate, before councils sold off all their properties when they got bored looking after the truly poor.  Now, I'm not going to slag off Tang Hall.  And not just because I have to walk through it every Saturday night either.  If it is a sink estate, it's a well-scrubbed one with no obvious blockages.  But there's definitely a very basic quality to the place.  The main row of shops are almost entirely devoted to fast food outlets except one which, rather worryingly, teaches martial arts.  York isn't a beautiful medieval city here.  It's the suburbs and it could be anywhere.  Tang Hall's sense of anonymity is increased by somebody choosing to give half the streets numbers instead of names.  Sixth Avenue, Fourth Avenue and so forth.  This isn't part of a logical American-style gridiron; the layout is as confusing as in any English suburb.  They just seemed to run out of inspiration, or interest.  Turn down Fifth Avenue, though, the longest and straightest of them.  Head back towards town, past another rather weary little parade of shops.  And there it is again, right in front of you.  The Minster, seeming through an optical trick to have been planted right in the heart of this forgotten district.

 (to be finished)

Contact

Diary

Odds and ends

Jakks Way

Photos

Teraf

York Guide