The Harrying of the North

Pottering around its medieval streets, especially The Shambles, it's clear that York is a wizard place to visit. People from across the world come to squeeze along cobbled snickelways, or experience the thrill of standing in a slow-moving queue.

One of the many great views of York Minster (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Visit the shrine of St Margaret Clitherow, in the very house she never lived in!

See Mad Alice Lane, which wasn't named after a woman hanged for being mad!

Take a Harry Potter tour of a city which J. K. Rowling never saw or visited and where none* of the movies were filmed!

It's a Yorkshire Shambles (Wikimedia Commons)

As York's UNESCO World Heritage bid rears its head again, I find The Idea Of York TM fascinating. It's a Roman fortress city, but the Eboracum project is a no-go. It's an industrial Viking town, but you've got to go beneath a shopping centre to see it. It's a medieval walled city, but most of the walls you can walk on are a 19th Century renovation.

People sell the city on a curious mix of myth and history - mystory? - and perhaps it doesn't matter. Everyone's interest in, and experience of, the city will be different. No version is wholly definitive. If they bring visitors in, and provide employment, and enjoyment, surely there's room for many different stories of York?

There is, especially in one of the UK's Creative Cities, but accuracy and truthfulness matter too. We must be careful not to mislead (unless, writing as someone with a track record in fishy business, that's a deliberate part of the activity).

So, you won't find Hogwarts or Gryffindor in York, but if you jump on a train to Malton, they've got warthogs and a griffined door. That's plenty to be going on with.

The Malton town coat of arms (from the Civic Heraldry of England website)

 

*OK, I accept that York railway station bridge does make a cameo appearance.