"York, Jorvik, Eboracum..." a York Travel Page by Sjalen

One of the most well-known cities in England and worth a long visit! Most people whizz through it as they think it is a small and compact city and whilst this is true geographically, there is so much to see here that you need at least three days to do it justice. Most people know of its huge "cathedral" - the York Minster - which is the biggest Gothic church building north of the Alps. What fewer know is that the city was founded by the Romans who made it one of their centres, calling it Eboracum (that's why you find many company names with "Ebor" in York) and stationing its 9th legion here. Then came the Vikings, who called it Jorvik and who had a great influence on the language in the region as still today the streets are known as gates just like in Scandinavia. After this, the city has had an interesting development both in the Wars of the Roses when Richard III used it as his Capital of the North, and in the English Civil War, and the countryside is full of famous battlefields from various centuries such as Stamford Bridge, Towton and Marston Moor.

Today, around 120.000 people live here, many of them students at the increasingly popular university in Heslington just outside the centre. The students are not always popular with the locals who these days struggle to find work in anything but tourism. Local York people not working with visitors work at the railway as York is one of Britain's railway centres, being along the main line London to Edinburgh and with smaller criss-crossing lines to Manchester and Hull. The train-making itself has sadly disappeared but railway infrastructure companies still employ many as does the chocolate factory Nestlé-Rowntrees still (founded by Rowntree but bought out by Nestlé), although by the anonymous look of the factory, it is maybe just a matter of time before it has to close the way Terry's have had to when production was moved (ironically for me to Sweden and Belgium). Chocolate making has been so important that there used to be a sign by the railway saying "Welcome to York where men are hunky and chocolate chunky" :-))) I can only agree since this is where I met my husband. These days, tourism has taken over much of the business and at times, the city centre sadly feels a bit like Disneyland, but who am I to complain. I was once a tourist here and liked it so much that I settled to dig deeper into one of the most interesting places in England.