Explore 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 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.