The news that the British government has included the walled city of York in its tentative list of six possible new UK Unesco world heritage sites will please many Yorkshire people. The real surprise is that it has taken so long and didn’t happen decades ago.
The case for York is overwhelming. Nowhere else in the British Isles is there so much remarkable archaeology and history, from different periods, concentrated in so small an area, stories which are so rich and compelling they go to the heart of Yorkshire and English culture and identity.
A city steeped in antiquity
The city goes back almost 2,000 years to 70AD when on a low moraine, close to where the rivers Foss and Ouse meet, the highest point a sea-going vessel can reach inland, the Roman legions established a garrison. This was to become the headquarters for their newly conquered northern province of Britain, Britannia Inferior. By the third century it had grown to become an important civil colony, where Emperor Constantine is reputed to have converted the empire to Christianity. Eboracum gained its first Christian Bishop in 312.
The city, now known as Eorforwic, continued to flourish in Anglian times. When Edwin, king of Northumbria, converted his kingdom to Christianity in 627, Yorkshire’s very first Anglo-Saxon Christian church was built on the site of what is now the minster. The city became a flourishing centre of trade, its first stone minster a centre of Northumbrian scholarship that produced the great scholar-monk Alcuin (735–804).
Vikings and Normans leave an indelible mark
But it was the Viking settlement in York, in the late ninth century, that established Jorvik, as it became known, as the capital of their independent kingdom, international port and manufacturing centre. York remains the only extant Viking city in terms of its archaeology and street patterns in the British Isles. The kingdom’s three separate divisions we now know as the historic counties of East, North and West Ridings, date from these times.
Reabsorbed into Anglo-Saxon England after the death of King Eric Bloodaxe in 954, York survived the disastrous Norman ‘Harrying of the North’, when rebellion by the Anglo-Viking population was brutally suppressed by William the Conqueror.
Within a few decades the city had recovered. Its medieval guilds of tradesmen and merchants soon re-established York as a commercial centre, as the guildhall and other great medieval halls belonging to the ‘merchant adventurers’ and other guilds testify. The York cycle of miracle plays performed by these guilds are recognised masterpieces.
The great rebuilt minster is one of the greatest Gothic cathedrals in Northern Europe, celebrated for both its architectural splendours and its magnificent stained glass – the 15th century Great East Window being the largest extant piece of medieval glass in Britain.
The city’s status as England’s second city, unofficial capital of the North, was reinforced by hosting Council of the North, during the reigns of Richard III and Henry VIII, based at the medieval King’s Manor that still survives.
Hurtling toward modernity
From Tudor times onwards, York was increasingly eclipsed by London and the growing wealth of southern ports and manufacturing centres of the Midlands and North. Yet the city enjoyed something of a renaissance in Georgian times, becoming a focus for fashionable gatherings, encouraged by some fine neo-classical buildings such as the Assembly Rooms.
Between the 1820s and 1860s, the city was, for a brief period, a nationally important focus for scientific thought and new ideas, thanks to the influence of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society and its secretary Professor John Phillips, (1800–74) – geologist, teacher, topographer, and now recognised as one of the world’s greatest palaeontologists. Phillip’s categorisation of early fossils influenced Darwin and led to our modern concept of deep time. He was the first curator of the nationally important Yorkshire Museum, built in the ruins of York’s great Benedictine St Mary’s Abbey.
Railways also reinforced York’s significance in the 19th century. Local entrepreneur, George Hudson, despite business practices that landed him in gaol, transformed the city into a major railway centre for the North, (an appropriate location for York’s National Railway Museum). This helped revive the city’s industries, including chocolate manufacturing. The Rowntrees, a Quaker family, who not only established Rowntree’s as a national brand, but established the worldwide anti-poverty campaigning Rowntree Trust.
Much of the old world lingers
It has been rightly said that much of York’s incredible heritage, especially its Roman, Anglian and Viking archaeology, still lies underground. A previous unsuccessful world heritage site bid was based on this still only partially discovered heritage, despite its evidence in the crypt of York Minster itself, or the wonderful Jorvik Centre excavated and recreated under building development in Coppergate.
But what is on the surface is glory enough. This is the most extant walled city in England, despite much rebuilding – though great medieval gates or ‘bars’, and an amazing stretch of Roman wall and the Multangular Tower remain. There are narrow streets and courts such as Stonegate and The Shambles, many medieval churches and houses, handsome Georgian mansions and halls.
King’s Square, near the minster may have been the site of the open-air Viking parliament or ‘Thing’. Clifford’s Tower, Henry III’s great 13th century fort, now restored by English Heritage, is now a perfect rooftop viewpoint of the city. The castle area, with the 18th century debtors’ and women’s prisons, now the Castle Museum, plus the law courts, is part of an imaginative York city council/civic trust restoration scheme, creating new areas of public space centring on the Eye of York – a small circle of grass and solitary small oak tree which is traditionally the centre of Yorkshire, close to where many great events – from proclamations to executions – took place and where the three ancient ridings meet.
Our heritage: as much about the present as the past
It will be a long, slow process, perhaps a decade, to achieve the inscription of York to join the coveted list of 33 UK world heritage sites, adding to our two existing Yorkshire world heritage sites, Fountains Abbey and Saltaire. On the negative side, there has been some unsightly modern commercial development within the city walls which may reduce the city’s appeal to the Unesco panel. World heritage site status can only be an incentive to replace such eyesores.
Some people fear that world heritage site inscription may draw even more tourists to the city, creating problems already difficult for the city to manage. The answer is surely to move away from hosting weekend alcohol-fuelled disruptive hen and stag parties, towards longer-stay, more discerning, higher-spending visitors drawn to the city’s heritage and its amazing stories.
But world heritage site status is important for another reason. York is the historic, cultural capital of the region; Yorkshire is far, far more than a mere English ‘county’. English devolution is now on agendas of all our main political parties, offering more power either to the new elected mayors – including one for York and North Yorkshire – or even better a devolved assembly elected by the people of the region, giving the people of Yorkshire more control over their future during a time of profound change and challenge.
Essential to this process is a sense of empowerment and self-belief. Heritage is as much about the present, and shaping of the future, as mere nostalgia for the past. Unesco worldwide recognition for our cultural capital would be a huge step in the right direction.
Colin Speakman’s latest publication The Lost Chronicles of York (Ings Poetry) includes a series of narrative poems that explore aspects of York’s early history in the medium of verse. Available at The Lost Chronicles of York by Colin Speakman – Gritstone Publishing Cooperative (gritstonecoop.co.uk))
