In York, Name That Century

An English Town of Many Ages, From Vikings to Victorians

The Shambles is the oldest street in York, England, dating to medieval times. (© Visityork.org)

On a cold spring morning in northwest England, on ground first contested more than a thousand years ago, a group of Viking warriors girded once again for battle.

They were oddly short, pink-cheeked Vikings, clad in sneakers, plastic breastplates and fleece jackets, and the broadswords they brandished toward the towers of York Minster were actually green Styrofoam noodles. Urged on by the battle cries of bloodthirsty parents, they were celebrating the first morning of the city's annual Viking Festival with a salute to their 9th-century ancestors' style of mayhem and pillage.

"Declan, kill him swiftly!" a bearded warrior-coach roared, through a body microphone hidden under chain mail. Eight-year-old Declan bent his noodle against an adult's chest, and the older man fell obligingly to the ground.

In York, it's 866 all over again. The city, 210 miles north of London, is a nicely kid-size serving of Britain's most fascinating layers of history. The compact pedestrian center along the River Ouse (pronounced "ooze") is a dignified, un-Disneyfied city, with enough London-caliber sights to fill a weekend family visit.

This summer, York serves up the past with a side of special events. The Roman emperor Constantine succeeded his father here, and that 1,700-year anniversary in July spotlights the city's Roman era. A cycle of the medieval Bible dramas called "mystery plays" will be performed by the craft guilds that still flourish here, and a new museum hands visitors trowels to explore ages from Victorian back to Tudor, Viking and pre-Christian.

Even its newest attraction is a smaller version of a big-city favorite: the Yorkshire Wheel is a gondola-style ride that apes London's bigger Eye for a view of the skyline.

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I saw the Victorian era first, as I arrived at the 1877 rail station adjoining the National Railway Museum. (Part of the fun was the high-speed, two-hour trip on the Flying Scotsman from London's King's Cross station.) In five minutes, I walked across the Lendal Bridge and further back in time.

Sheltered by Roman walls and crowned by the city's famous cathedral, York's handsome downtown is the tourist and shopping mecca. Topshop, a snazzy clothing chain, flaunts 21st-century fashions alongside Roman baths and museums. The medieval Shambles, a merchant lane mentioned in William the Conqueror's 1086 census, the Domesday Book, is still open for business. On this street, "family business" means living above the shop for 700 years. Honey-colored limestone squares festooned with red and white flowers (Wars of the Roses references are big here) offer a variety of scenes: young buskers in St. Helen's Square, a greengrocer in Kings Square, and in St. Sampson's Square, an introduction to the Viking past.

Vikings invaded from across the North Sea in 866 and stayed 200 years. As the conquerors married the conquered, the city became one of the largest in Europe (its current population is 181,000). Borrowing the Romans' city walls and plumbing, the Vikings built a wooden town along the river port. In 1976, while building a downtown shopping center, bulldozers unearthed the whole down-and-dirty town, then called Jorvik, buried below.

The nearby Jorvik Viking Centre, which opened in 1984, promises to make the settlement come to life, and the families patiently queuing through a well-stocked gift shop suggested it was an attraction worth waiting for.

Alas, it wasn't. Jorvik's main draw is a jampacked amusement ride through a staid diorama of the year AD 975, with a few wall displays, skeletal remains and craft demonstrations ("make a Viking coin: £1.50") thrown in. It's probably the only one of the town's attractions where a judicious touch of Disney might be welcome.