Just under half an hours journey by car from our holiday let, we spent almost the entire day in York. It is a likeable city, packed with historic buildings. Like Norwich it has medieval churches on almost every corner. These days often repurposed as cafes, galleries or antique emporiums. The last time we were here was just post Covid, and it had suffered a lot of retail losses. Many of the national chains had gone for good, or left the city centre for out of town shopping at the outer ring of Park and Ride sites.
Medieval cities, and York is a classic example, are a warren of tightly packed streets. Its shopping area is vast and complex. Its not particularly zoned either, so you have to do a lot of wandering about to really get a flavour for what is here. This is exhausting. We appear to come to York in late September, and there is always a Food Festival on. Lots of street vendors and artizan makers under canvas. We thought this year it was considerably less artizan and generally poorer quality makers, veering more towards the novelty and junk food end than previously. And this turned out to be our more general impression for how York was fairing. Less quality and considerably more crap touristy orientated. I guess that's where the bucks are.
Hubby had heard about a shop in York called This Shop Is So Gay, so we sought it out. It gave off a slightly alternative hippy vibe externally. The stock was mainly novelty gay themed stuff - badges, necklaces, bags and posters, lots of the same imagery spread out over tables across quite a large interior. This shop, either needs to move to a smaller shop, or buy a more diverse range of stock, or it will be dead within a very short time.
Whilst buying a gorgeous rye bread in the alternative vibe of The Bluebird Bakery, I noticed a poster on its walls advertising an event - Frieda Nipples Presents ...... Baps and Buns. Oh, that reminds me, something I forgot to mention - Yorkshire is full of shops with names that are puns - the best in Whitby was a takeaway called Bits n Pizzas. There's a shoe shop called Brogues Gallery in Pickering
Eating wise we had a lovely vegan breakfast at Bills. Followed by a coffee and cake in an independent cafe called The Arras. I had a rather quality Cinnamon Bun, whilst I watched Hubby eat an absolutely enormous Cruffin, that looked as though it had been baked in a flower pot. Lunch was in the really rather Fab - Ippuku Tea House, serving quietly authentic Japanese homestyle cuisine. I highly recommend if you are ever in York.
The York Art Gallery is always worth a revisit, if only for its extremely good contemporary ceramics collection. It also has excellent feature exhibitions. Two new ones for the autumn/winter season had opened this week, which are really worth seeing. One has entrants for The Aesthetica Art Prize 2025, featuring a wide ranging mix of styles and media work from contemporary artists. Alongside it an exhibition called Future Tense featured previous winners of the Art Prize. The best piece was Submergence an interactive sensory light piece by an art collective called Squidsoup. We both of us spent ages here, it was quite meditative and therapeutic. Lots of shivers of in the moment bliss.
We got home pretty whacked and more than a bit frazzled around the edges. The intensely hectic, sensory stimulating and closely packed peopled character of it. I guess we are just not used to this these days.
No comments:
Post a Comment