England · Old Town
York
A self-guided walking tour of the York Old Town, every street in two days.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of York is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 33.8 km
- Time
- about 9.5 hours
- Streets
- 194
- Steps
- 7 streets with steps
- Start point
- York Minster
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
York Minster 1,500 points
The one you can see from everywhere, and the reason half the lanes here bend the way they do. Do the outside first, all the way round, close to the stone. On the north side the ground falls away and the thing grows on you. I have never managed the whole lap in one sitting.
Clifford's Tower 500 points
It sits on its own small rise in the south-east of the level, on the far side of the car park, and there are steps. Take them. From the top the town lies out flat and you can finally see how the two rivers pinch it. Best view I get from anywhere that is not a wall.
Jorvik Viking Centre 500 points
It is downstairs, beneath a shopping street, which is exactly where I would want it. You wait your turn up at street level and then go below the surface you have been walking on all day. Down is where a street keeps the parts it does not show you.
St Mary's Abbey 500 points
North-west of the level, inside the Museum Gardens, where the lanes finally stop and there is grass. Late in the day is the hour for it, when the arches throw their shadows a long way across the lawn. Sit down on the grass a while. I have, for about eight hundred years.
Kings Square 250 points
A small open space right in the middle of everything, with the Shambles running off one corner of it. Everybody halts here to work out which way they are going, and everybody is looking at head height. This is one of the few spots in town where the interesting part is below your boots.
Micklegate Bar 250 points
The far west end of the level, up at the top of Micklegate. Stop underneath before you walk through and look at the ceiling of the arch. Then cross the road and look back. From over there it is a different building, and I have never decided which of the two I like.
Monk Bar 250 points
North-east corner, and the biggest of the four. If you are doing the wall walk from the Minster this is where it sets you back down on the street, so most visitors go under it twice without once looking up. Look up. More carving on it than on anything in York that is not a church.
Walmgate Bar 250 points
The far east end, and the longest walk out to it. That is the point of it. The wall runs a long straight line towards it and the town thins out behind you as you go, until it is just you, the rampart and a great deal of sky. Turn round at the top of the steps and look back at what you ate.
York Castle Museum 250 points
South end of the level, down by the water, two heavy blocks with a lawn between them. From outside it gives away nothing at all, which is the best trick in this town. Set aside an afternoon for it. I mean a real one.
Eating
Actual food.
York eats like Yorkshire, and Yorkshire cooks with an oven. Batter under the joint, pork inside a hot crust, curds in pastry, oats and treacle in a tin. What is not baked grew flat and close by: the Vale for the grain and the beef, the dale to the west for the cheese, and rhubarb pulled by candlelight out of dark sheds twenty five miles down the road. Then a hundred years of sugar happened to this town, and it never quite wore off.
Meat and fish
Two, and the missing one has a name. This city gave the country York ham, dry cured and salty enough to argue about, and the last curer inside the walls shut years ago. A dish I cannot send you to is not a recommendation, so it is not on the list. What is left came out of an oven, which is most of Yorkshire anyway.
Yorkshire pudding
Egg, flour and milk, poured into fat hot enough to spit, and the batter climbs the tin. The pan used to stand under the roasting joint and catch what dripped off it. Then the pudding came to the table first, on its own with gravy, so that less of the expensive thing was needed after it. A dish invented against your appetite, and it outlived the thrift.
Sources: Historic UK, Welcome to Yorkshire, Great British Chefs
Pork pie, the growler
Cured pork in a hot water crust, raised by hand around a mould, with jelly poured in through the hole in the lid. The north calls it a growler, after the noise a stomach makes on either side of eating one. Yorkshire eats it warm while the rest of the country eats it cold, and York judges them once a year in a hall that was a pork butcher's before it was a hall.
Sources: Country Life, Great British Chefs, YorkMix
Vegetarian
Yorkshire Wensleydale with fruit cake
A crumbly white cows milk cheese from the dale west of here. The name is protected, so anything called Yorkshire Wensleydale has to be made there. The county eats it sitting on a slice of fruit cake, which sounds wrong on paper. Try it before you argue with anybody about it.
Sources: GOV.UK, Great British Chefs
Yorkshire curd tart
Curd cheese, butter, currants and nutmeg in a short pastry case, baked until the top freckles. It goes back to the middle of the 17th century and was made at Whitsun out of the curds left over from cheesemaking, which is thrift again, in a different direction. The bakeries here call it the York curd tart. I am not the one who is going to tell the rest of the county.
Sources: Great British Life, Welcome to Yorkshire, Great British Chefs
Parkin
Oats, black treacle and ginger, baked into a dark sticky square somewhere between a cake and a gingerbread. It comes out around the fires on the fifth of November, though Yorkshire used to eat it right through the winter instead, which I consider the correct amount of parkin.
Sources: Great British Life, Historic UK, Great British Chefs
Vegan
Short, and it is fruit. The old plant food in this county is what grew on a tree or came out of the ground, because the baking here runs on butter and eggs from end to end. Both of these are protected or listed by name, which is more than most of the famous dishes manage.
Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb
Pink stalks grown in the dark. The roots stand two years in a field, then go into heated sheds where no light is let in, because light would toughen them, and the crop is picked by candle. The name is protected and the ground is a triangle of country west of here. Pudding menus in this town run on it.
January to March. Outside those weeks the rhubarb on the menu grew outdoors somewhere else, and it is a different thing.
Sources: GOV.UK, Defra, Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity
Ribston Pippin
An apple grown from a pip carried back from Rouen in the early 1700s and planted at Ribston Hall, an hour west of here. It fell out of the trade a century ago and lives in gardens and old orchards now. Sharp, aromatic, and the Cox is said to descend from it. A fruit that stopped selling and kept going anyway.
Not something a kitchen will have. Ask at a market stall or a farm shop in October, and ask by name.
Late breakfast
Partisan come for the one thing: the Persian eggs
112 Micklegate
Micklegate, the long street that runs down from Micklegate Bar towards the river. Two small rooms full of vintage furniture and art, and a counter piled with sourdough and cakes. Come for the Persian eggs, scrambled with spinach, onion, dates and yoghurt. Dates in my eggs. Six hundred years old, and still learning.
- Mon09:00–15:00
- Tue09:00–15:00
- Wed09:00–15:00
- Thu09:00–15:00
- Fri09:00–15:00
- Sat09:00–15:00
- Sun09:00–15:00
Daytime only, and the queue outside is mostly for the bread.
Sources: The Good Food Guide, Squidbeak
Robinsons where locals go
7-9 Bishopthorpe Road
The city end of Bishopthorpe Road. A small neighbourhood café with tables inside and out on the pavement, busy from breakfast straight through lunch, and pushchairs are part of the furniture. Pancake stacks, eggs on sourdough, and a queue at peak times because nobody takes bookings. A queue for breakfast is the only kind I understand.
- Mon08:30–15:00
- Tue08:30–15:00
- Wedclosed
- Thu08:30–15:00
- Fri08:30–15:00
- Sat09:00–15:00
- Sun09:00–15:00
No bookings, and it is closed on Wednesday.
Sources: The Good Food Guide, Squidbeak, Little Vikings
Afternoon coffee
Spring Espresso Fossgate the old one
45-46 Fossgate
Fossgate, the older of the house's two shops, a short walk from the Merchant Adventurers' Hall. It has been making coffee at this address since the autumn of 2011, and the newer cafés on the street still measure themselves against it. Seats squeezed close together, breakfast and cake beside the cup. Fifteen years is an afternoon to me. For a coffee shop it is a long, well fed life.
- Mon08:00–16:30
- Tue08:00–16:30
- Wed08:00–16:30
- Thu08:00–16:30
- Fri08:00–16:30
- Sat08:00–16:30
- Sun08:00–16:30
The kitchen stops at three on weekdays and at half past three at the weekend.
Sources: The Good Food Guide, Brian's Coffee Spot, European Coffee Trip
Brew & Brownie come for the one thing: the brownie
5 Museum Street
Museum Street, on the walk from the station to the Minster. A long room with table service, local art on the white walls, and a counter that looks like an old kitchen range. The name tells you what goes with the cup: a brownie, or a stack of small thick pancakes, which stay on as brunch all day. It did well enough on sweets to open a bakeshop two doors down. I understand that kind of appetite.
- Mon09:00–16:30
- Tue09:00–16:30
- Wed09:00–16:30
- Thu09:00–16:30
- Fri09:00–16:30
- Sat09:00–17:00
- Sun09:00–16:30
Sources: The Good Food Guide, Brian's Coffee Spot
Kiosk where locals go
41 Fossgate
Fossgate, right beside the Merchant Adventurers' Hall and easy to walk straight past. Part gallery and part café since April 2016, with ceramics, textiles and jewellery for sale on the shelves all around your table. A tiny kitchen at the back does the food. The whole room is narrower than some alleys I have eaten, and just as satisfying.
Sources: The Good Food Guide, Squidbeak, Brian's Coffee Spot, European Coffee Trip
Dinner
Café No.8 Bistro the old one
8 Gillygate
Gillygate, a few steps outside Bootham Bar, in a row of small independent shops. A family bistro that has cooked here since 2002, with a front room of a handful of tables and a garden room behind it that backs onto the city walls. The short menu is built on Yorkshire produce. Twenty four years is nothing to a cobble. For a room this small it is a great many dinners.
- Monclosed
- Tueclosed
- Wed17:00–22:00
- Thu17:00–22:00
- Fri17:00–22:00
- Sat17:00–22:00
- Sun12:00–16:00
Evenings from Wednesday to Saturday, lunch on Sunday. The room is small, so book.
Sources: Harden's, The Good Food Guide
Yemen Heaven come for the one thing: the fah'sa in its stone pot
98 Walmgate
Walmgate, in an old corner house whose wood panelling and parquet floor stayed put when a family from Yemen took it over. Order the fah'sa, a lamb stew with fenugreek that reaches the table in a stone pot still boiling, or the chicken mandi, chicken on the bone with rice and nothing to hide behind. Soft flatbread comes warm from the oven. A stew still boiling when it lands has to wait for me, for once.
Sources: Harden's, The Observer
Il Paradiso del Cibo where locals go
40 Walmgate
Walmgate, where Fossgate runs on east. A small homely Italian run by a chef from Sardinia, noisy and cheerful, with regulars at the next table. The fresh pasta is made in the house and the specials board follows the season. This kitchen will refuse you parmesan when the dish does not need it. Anyone that strict about a topping has my respect.
- Mon12:00–22:00
- Tue12:00–22:00
- Wed12:00–22:00
- Thu12:00–22:00
- Fri12:00–22:00
- Sat12:00–22:00
- Sun12:00–22:00
Sources: Harden's, The Good Food Guide, On Magazine
Checked 13 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called York.
The Romans wrote it Eboracum, a Latin coat thrown over a Celtic name that most likely meant the place of a man called Eburos. Eburos did not keep it long. The word sounded like Boar Town to Roman ears, and an altar found at Bordeaux gives the city a boar as a punning badge. Modern York is what is left of Eboracum after eighteen centuries of mouths. A man turned into a pig, and the pig wore down to four letters.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
The Vale of York is flat, wet ground that still floods, and at the time this all began it may well have been waterlogged. Two ridges of boulder clay and gravel cross the valley, dumped there by ice, and they were the only dry way over. York sits on the northern one, on a low plateau between the Ouse and the Foss, and the Ouse is tidal this far up, so boats could reach it. A dry line across a wet floor, with water transport at the end of it. Put anything there and the whole country has to walk past your door.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
Why then
When the first stone went down.
In the year 71 Petillius Cerialis took the Ninth Legion out of Lincoln to campaign in the north, and left it standing here. That is the whole founding: five thousand men needed somewhere dry to put their feet. The first fortress was an earth bank and a timber palisade. Stone arrived early in the second century, and on two sides of the city the medieval wall is still sitting on top of it.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk; www.historyofyork.org.uk; www.british-history.ac.uk
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 71–400
Rome, and for most of that it was a garrison rather than a town. The Ninth Legion put the fortress up in 71 and the Sixth took over from them not long after, for reasons nobody has ever worked out. When Severus divided Britain into two provinces, York became the capital of the lower one. Later an emperor died here, and the soldiers named his son in his place. That is the most consequential thing that has ever happened in this city, and it took an afternoon.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk; www.historyofyork.org.uk
- 627–866
The kings of Northumbria. On Easter Sunday, 12 April 627, King Edwin was christened here in a church of wood he had put up in a hurry while he was still being taught what he was agreeing to. Northumbria was one of the largest kingdoms in Britain and it ran York for two and a half centuries. Almost none of that is above ground now.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 866–954
The Scandinavian kings. The Danish army came out of East Anglia in 866 and took the city on 1 November, and for most of the next ninety years York was the seat of a Norse kingdom with its own rulers. The last of them was driven out in 954 and that was the end of it. What they left behind is not a building. It is the street names, and you will be reading those all afternoon.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 1154–1396
The king, held at arm's length, and the citizens buying their way out from under his sheriff one privilege at a time. York's first royal charter, dated somewhere between 1154 and 1158, confirmed the citizens' liberties, laws and customs and their Merchant Guild. By 1213 a royal writ was addressed to the mayor of York, so by then there was one. Every single one of those rights was paid for in cash. The method here for two hundred and forty years was to make yourself expensive and then wait.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
- 1396–
The city itself. In 1396 Richard II gave York the status of a county in its own right. The mayor became escheator, and two sheriffs took over from the three bailiffs and held their own county court once a month. With that charter, says the county history, the medieval liberties of York were full-grown. It has had a mayor and it has had sheriffs ever since, which is the same arrangement running for six hundred and thirty years. I like a town that settles on something.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
The emblem
What the shield means.
The city's own shield is a silver field with a red cross on it and five small gold lions walking along the cross. Handsome on a banner. At the size of an icon it is a red plus sign with crumbs on it. So the glyph is the Minster's west end instead: two tall towers at the corners, a squarer one behind and above them over the crossing, and one huge window in the middle. That is the shape this town shows you from the end of every long street, which is exactly what an icon is for.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk; historicengland.org.uk
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The walls, the ditches, the castle, the fishpond of the Foss and the two rivers together made a ring that went right round the city, and the restored wall still follows the whole of that circuit but for three short gaps. It is a footpath now. In 1829 the York Footpath Association drew up the first proper plan to put it back in order, section by section, and since the 1880s the corporation has kept the entire round open as a public walk. A defence that gave up and became a path. I approve of the career change.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
Two of the streets on this level are Roman roads wearing Norse names. The legionary fortress covered just under fifty acres, and its two main roads crossed at right angles in the middle of it. One of them is Stonegate. The other is Petergate, High and Low. Everything above has been knocked down and rebuilt several times over, and the lines underneath have not moved an inch. A street is much harder to get rid of than a building.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
For about a century this was a sweet-making town. In 1851 the second largest employer in York was Joseph Terry, confectioner, of St Helen's Square, which you cross on this level. By 1901 the census counted 1,194 chocolate and cocoa makers here, and another 800 people making jams, preserves and sweets. Rowntree alone went from 100 workers in 1879 to 4,066 thirty years later. I eat streets, and even I think that is a lot of sugar.
Sources: www.british-history.ac.uk
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- gate
- Not a gate. From Old Norse gata, a way or a street, and this town is full of them: Stonegate, Coppergate, Goodramgate, Fossgate, Swinegate, Colliergate, Micklegate. Micklegate is simply the big one.
- bar
- The gates in the wall, on the other hand, are bars. So the streets are gates and the gates are bars. Bar Lane and Monk Bar Court are named after them, and nobody here finds this confusing, which I admire.
- yard
- A slot between two buildings that opens into a courtyard behind. Coffee Yard, Nelson's Yard, Hurst's Yard, Melroses Yard, Dixons Yard. Some of them are barely shoulder-width, and those are my favourites.
- staith
- A landing place on the river, where boats tied up and unloaded. King's Staith on one bank, Queen Staith Road and Queen's Staith Mews on the other. Both banks go under when the Ouse comes up, and the Ouse comes up.
- garth
- A piece of ground with a fence round it, from Old Norse gardr, the same word behind garden and yard. Bartle Garth and Pond Garth are the two that are left.
- court
- A named dead end off a bigger street, usually carrying the name of whoever owned it. Precentor's Court, Cordwainers Court, Lady Anne Court, Bishops Court, Hothams Court. I have firm views about dead ends and I am keeping them to myself here, because these ones are pretty.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: York in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 194streets
- 1,778dots
- 26.7km of street
- 33.8km on foot
- 9.5hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.