It’s been a long time, almost eight years, since my last visit to York, but last week I had the chance to take another short trip to this beautiful city.
Have you ever been to York? If so, where did you go? Which of the many wonderful museums did you get the chance to visit? I only visited a handful. I think it would take me months to see them all, and years to notice and appreciate every detail.
Back in 2017, I visited and fell in love with Fairfax House, built in 1755-1762 by John Carr for Lord Fairfax of Emley.
It was not possible to visit it again last week, but Fairfax House ranks high among the gems that will draw me back to York soon, not least because indoor photography was not allowed in 2017, but is positively encouraged now. Until I come back with my own photos, please feast your eyes on the Fairfax House website and fall in love with John Carr’s work of art, just as I did.
York Castle Museum is just 5 minutes’ walk away. If you ever go to York, don’t miss it. It’s a delightful treasure trove. I could have spent hours examining every tiny item in the fashion gallery and the period rooms, and I don’t think I could ever have enough of Kirkgate!
As explained on the museum website, Kirkgate is an indoor recreation of a street from a bygone age, using original items from the Victorian period and earlier, and original shop-fronts as well, the oldest being a sixteenth-century timber-framed building that came from Stamford in Lincolnshire. Something tells me I will go back to York Castle Museum before long to linger until closing time and explore every corner and every shop window.
I’d also love to explore York Minster once again. I remember some deeply moving discoveries made during my last visit. One of them was the story of the Rose Window, lovingly restored after the devastating fire of 1984, when the 500-year-old stained glass window, a symbol of the union between Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, cracked in 40,000 places due to the extreme heat. The restoration took the best part of four years. Each of the individual pieces of glass (over 8000 in total) were painstakingly dismantled, the cracks were filled with an adhesive with the same refractive index, and then each piece was sandwiched between two layers of clear glass in order to preserve it, should the adhesive fail in the future. The 1980s repairs are currently assessed as part of a significant project announced last summer, which aims to establish whether the methods and materials used have stood up the test of time. (You can find out more about the original restoration and the current project in the BBC and York Minster articles listed under Sources).
The other features that stayed with me after my last visit to York Minster were the Roman murals discovered in the 1960s, during the vast project undertaken in order to strengthen the foundations of the Minster, which were structurally in danger. Archaeologists found fragments attached to the surviving walls and reassembled the painted plaster murals where they originally stood almost two thousand years ago, after the Roman army came to the north of England and built a mighty fortress on the site of the present-day York Minster.
And this, in a nutshell, is what I love the most about York: you can see how it grew, one layer of history over another, and the clues and artefacts are still there for us to discover, such as the murals in the York Minster Undercroft; or the fragment of a Roman column used as a base for a timber frame post when medieval builders erected one of the nine buildings that now form the Old White Swan; or the numbers carved into the timber frame of a house on High Petergate, telling us that it was built in 1646; or the Shambles, where haunches of meat are no longer on display, but the ancient street is lined by the same buildings that stood there since the 1400s.
If you visited York before, what did you love the most? Or you’re one of the lucky people who live there, what hidden gems would you advise us to look for?
Sources:
https://fairfaxhouse.co.uk/
https://www.yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/iloveny/minster/fire/peter_gibson.shtml
https://yorkminster.org/latest/revisiting-york-minsters-rose-window/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5w2p4z3g9o
https://yorkcivictrust.co.uk/heritage/civic-trust-plaques/roman-fortress/
Joana Starnes 
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