York entdecken

Clifford's Tower is the stone keep of York Castle, built for Henry III between 1245 and about 1270 on the mound raised for William the Conqueror's castle in 1068. The two-storey tower has a plan of four round lobes. An explosion gutted it in 1684; since 2022 new timber stairs and a roof deck inside the walls lead to views over York.

York Castle Museum occupies two 18th-century prison buildings on the site of York Castle, the Debtors' Prison and the Female Prison. Founded in 1938 around John Kirk's collection of everyday objects, it shows social history from period rooms to Kirkgate, a reconstructed Victorian street, and the prison cells, among them the condemned cell.

Fairfax House is a Georgian townhouse on Castlegate, built in the early 1740s and remodelled inside by the architect John Carr from 1761 for Charles Gregory, 9th Viscount Fairfax. York Civic Trust restored it in the 1980s after use as a club, a building society and a cinema, and it now shows Noel Terry's collection of 18th-century English furniture and clocks.

York Museum Gardens are 4-hectare botanic gardens beside the River Ouse, laid out in the 1830s for the Yorkshire Philosophical Society around the Yorkshire Museum. Among the lawns and trees stand the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, the Roman Multangular Tower, the medieval Hospitium and the society's 19th-century observatory.

York Minster is the Anglican cathedral of York and seat of the Archbishop of York, built mainly between 1220 and 1472 on a site where a church is recorded in 627. It keeps most of its medieval stained glass, including the Great East Window and the Five Sisters window, and visitors can also see the Undercroft museum and climb the central tower.

The Yorkshire Museum opened in 1830 in a Greek Revival building by William Wilkins, built for the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in what are now the Museum Gardens. Its collections cover archaeology, geology, biology and astronomy, with galleries on Roman York, the Vikings and Jurassic Yorkshire and objects such as the 15th-century Middleham Jewel.