During a recent visit to York, I was told it was a Viking city, a Roman city, a city famous for chocolate, and England’s most haunted city. While the folk of the North Yorkshire city may have a habit of playing fast and loose with some superlatives, it is clear York was a place of many faces. And one of those was born from its medieval history.

Making a sharp right off a busy cobbled street with all the usual chains you would expect  in a tourist hotspot, I turned onto Coffee Lane. The word ginnel became a talking point on this trip to York. A ginnel is a walkway between commercial buildings, and a snicket is a passage through residential buildings. Confusingly, Coffee Lane is a hybrid – a snickleway. And so we headed down the quaint snickleway to Barley Hall, a medieval townhouse that was originally built in 1360 by the monks of Nostell Priory. The property was in disarray before renovation works brought it back to life in the early 1990s. 

You can walk around Barley Hall easily in twenty minutes. The restored home has a grand hall with a large feathered peacock and a surrounding feast that transports you to the evening of a wealthy medieval family. A short walk there takes you to the Roman Bath pub. This bizarre set-up sees museum goers walk into a red-carpeted pub, past the midday pint drinkers and down some wooden steps to a hot underground room home to a Roman Bath house. It was stumbled upon in the 1930s while the pub owner was digging a new cellar after a flood.

Following an excellent introduction from the museum host, we explored the space, walking over the suspended steel walkway through the Trepidarium (warm room), Caldarium (hot steam room), and Frigidarium (cold plunge room). The room – which smelled distinctly peaty- also had a handful of Roman artifacts. When you’re finished with your mini tour, you simply pop up the other side to a host of slightly confused-looking pub goers and back out onto the street.  

If you’re in need of a sit-down, The Van Gogh experience in Castlegate’s St Mary’s Church could be your next stop. This is quite a relaxing activity – and you can sit back in some cold but comfortable chairs and enjoy Van Gogh’s artworks projected across the Anglican church walls. 

Before your feet start freezing off, you can then choose to clock into the Virtual Reality experience. The Jorvik Viking Centre was wholly unexpected. You are plunged into the Viking world with some wholeheartedly enthusiastic actors. Ours, Ivar, riffed on some Viking history as we waited to get on our carriage that would float us around an animatronic reconstruction of a Viking town.

This uncanny valley experience was created by the model’s faces, which had been reconstructed by archeologists studying Viking skulls buried on the site. The room was also perfumed with the real-life smells of a Viking town. These hot, slightly overwhelming odors, in combination with muttered Norse and an eerie vignette of a faceless girl tied to a ladder, meant the immersion into the brutality of Viking life was near total. 

York Minster may be for the more traditional sightseers, but it’s a classic for a reason. This beautiful, towering cathedral is absolutely worth the hype, and you could stand for hours under all 128 of its most medieval stained glass windows. There is also one section you can descend into to see the even older foundations of the place of worship. 

York Minster also has its own dedicated museum, the Undercroft, which tells the story of two millennia of York’s history. All of these attractions are available through the purchase of the Visit York pass, the city’s official sightseeing pass. The Visit York Pass 3-day pass is £99 per adult and £60 per child.

At the end of a hard day’s sightseeing, I checked into York’s newly renovated Ibis Style, which is themed around beer and breweries. Starting at £130 for a twin room based on two people sharing, it comes highly recommended.