I’ve long wanted to write a blogpost about one of my favourite places in the whole world: the city of York in Yorkshire, England. I was lucky enough to have Soumya studying at the University of York the same year I was at Edinburgh, and I spent a considerable sum of money on return train fares to York and visited her at least four times. Everything about York screams ‘OLD’. Okay, that’s a really inelegant way of putting it. What I mean is, I could smell history in the air from the moment I stepped off the train and into the Victorian railway station.
York was the biggest city in the north of England in medieval times. It is a walled city, and one of my favourite things to do when I visited was walk on the city walls, where in ancient times soldiers defended the city from besiegers.
The whole history of the English is visible in York: the Romans were, there, as were the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. Heck, there are even Indian restaurants run by Bangladeshis now (I’ve been to one). I’ve seen Roman walls, medieval church towers and the ruins of Norman houses. I’ve wandered into churchyards and walked through the Shambles, which is a street whose name is derived from the old word for meat shelf, because it was the location of the meat market. York has seen William the Conqueror’s wrath in the harrying of the North, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace and suffered the dissolution of the monasteries by good old Henry VIII. It was near York that the Battle of Stamford Bridge was fought by the ill-fated Harold Godwinson. Guy Fawkes was born in York, as was WH Auden.
And of course, there’s the Minster. York Minster towers above everything else, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off it when you’re in the vicinity. It must be one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen, because every inch of it is so intricately carved, so precisely proportioned that it arrests you and doesn’t let you turn your gaze away. The first time I saw it, Burke’s definition of the sublime sprang to mind effortlessly because that is exactly what it is.
And once inside, I kept running into familiar things: Edward III and Philippa of Hainault were married here; the chapel of the Duke of Wellington’s regiment is here, with the names of cities in every country from Spain to the Indian subcontinent wrought into the grilles; but my favourite thing inside the Minster has to be the screen consisting of statues of the medieval Kings of England. I had endless fun trying to figure out who was who (William Rufus had slightly red cheeks; John looked terribly evil):
Each time I visited York, I came to the same conclusion (which I promptly proceeded to state to Soumya, even though she’d heard it before): I could be blissfully, perennially happy if I lived in York. I’d make trips to Betty’s tea rooms, I’d walk around the Minster and through the Snickelways, I’d do my shopping in the weekly markets and I’d lie on the grass in the Museum Gardens, among the ruins, and read my life away. I’d visit churches – old and new – and wander their graveyards, I’d go to theatre performances and concerts and I would be content.
York always filled me with pure joy.
There are few places in the world I would say that about, but I would never object to adding more to my list :)
