Many people have been inspired to write about York. The following is a small selection of the quotable passages I've read in my research for these pages.
"The visual wealth of York is in the secular city itself, one of the richest and most complex townscapes in the world. It is the most medieval in feeling of all English cities, a city of streets rather than spaces, and its streets are so narrow and bent to close all vistas and lead the walker round corners . . ."
- Viscount Esher, 1968
"York's natural tangle needs loving care. The city's jumbled roof-lines, dog-leg alleyways and sudden courtyards are often inspiring, always entertaining. They may be the mongrel offspring of the unplanned ages, but they have the charm of the unexpected."
- Ronald Willis - Portrait of York, 1982
"The old walls of York form an irregular quadrangle of very peculiar structure, to which I have never seen any thing at all similar, except at Chester. They have lately been repaired and restored in their original style . . . At York the only path along the walls, is a narrow stone trottoir, upon which two persons can scarcely walk abreast. This is very inconvenient, but it is picturesque and interesting. Sometimes this trottoir winds in between large masses of houses, sometimes it runs out into more open ground, and permits many a delightful glimpse of the open country beyond, and of the rich landscape round the city."
- J G Kohl, 1842
York is now well-established as a tourist destination, and its monuments are carefully preserved and maintained. It wasn't always that way. Accounts from visitors in 1844 suggests that in the mid-19th century some of our landmarks were being overgrown by greenery.
Carl Gustav Carus, writing in 1844, said, "The ruins of St Mary's Church [note - St Mary's Abbey, pictured left] rose gracefully . . . Several cells, with large Gothic windows, are still standing, built of a clear white limestone, very elegantly wreathed with ivy, and shaded by elms.". J G Kohl, quoted above, also mentions that St Mary's was at that time "overgrown with luxuriant ivy".
It wasn't just St Mary's Abbey. Carl Gustav Carus, in the same piece from 1844, also mentions "This old Clifford's Tower, of which only the surrounding wall is still standing, and in which an old walnut-tree spreads out its branches . . .". I've not been inside Clifford's Tower for some years, but I think it's safe to say that the walnut-tree no longer grows there.
"The city's true spirit must be sought in its civic buildings, its old streets and carved shop-fronts, its inns, gardens, turreted walls and forsaken corners, above all in its wonderful little parish churches which linked the hard heads of its old townsmen with the unseen and mythical worlds of their creed."
- A G Dickens, 1952/53
"The souls of cities respond even less easily than those of men to mere cataloguing; a hundred pages of it would never suffice to render the strong, unmistakable, yet word-elusive personality of York. As with that ancestral sense, you may feel it if you linger in the right places at the right times, perhaps on some spring evening when the sun is gilding this forest of red brick and white limestone. The dream descends as you walk along the northern parapet of the wall, when in the gardens of the canons' houses the stiff, gummy chestnut buds cluster between you and the Minster. It comes as you pause in the dusty, forgotten purlieus of Bishophill, a piano strumming in some melancholy terrace, the light dying on the bricks and tiles of the rose-red city."
- A G Dickens, 1952/53
"Edmund Burke has told us that "A civil Society is a Partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are not born".
We cannot see the City of our Dreams without thinking of our great inheritance from the past and the present. There are few places in England where this partnership has been so fruitful as York, few places where the rulers of the City have so great a responsibility of preserving the beauty of the past whilst providing for the development of the City ..."
- J B Morrell - The City of our Dreams, 1955
"Modern York has given us the amenities of City life, it has provided the City with drains, it has paved our streets, supplied us with water, gas and electricity. It has given us schools, parks and playgrounds, cleared away the slums and rehoused a large part of our citizens. Were a Roman soldier living here today he would make a willing offering to the genius of the place*."
- J B Morrell - The City of our Dreams, 1955
*[Latin "genio loci" - as recorded in two of the Roman inscriptions discovered in York.]