Explore York

York's city walls enclose much of the historic centre and partly follow the walls of the Roman fortress founded around AD 71, though most of the surviving stonework is medieval. A walkway runs along the top, past towers and the four main gatehouses, known as bars: Bootham Bar, Monk Bar, Walmgate Bar and Micklegate Bar.

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.

The York Dungeon is a walk-through attraction on Clifford Street in York, opened in 1986 as the second Dungeon after London's and run by Merlin Entertainments. Actors lead visitors through ten live shows with sets and special effects that retell 2,000 years of the city's darker history, from the Vikings to Guy Fawkes.

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.

The Shambles is a narrow street in central York lined with timber-framed buildings, some from the 14th century, whose jettied upper floors overhang the cobbles. It was once the 'Great Flesh Shambles', the city's butchers' street; 31 butchers' shops traded here in 1885, and today the buildings hold shops and cafés.

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.

The National Railway Museum in York, part of the Science Museum Group, opened in 1975 on the site of a former locomotive depot next to York station. It holds the national collection of railway vehicles, among them the steam locomotive Mallard, which set a speed record in 1938, and a Japanese Shinkansen train, shown in the Great Hall and the Station Hall.

Treasurer's House stands in Minster Yard, just north of York Minster, on the site of the house of the Minster's treasurers from 1091 until 1547. The present building is largely 17th-century. The industrialist Frank Green restored it from 1897 to display his furniture and art collection, and in 1930 gave the house and its contents to the National Trust.