Y is for ... Young .. n ... Years

 

Hello and welcome! to another A-Z series on M-i-V... 

All through April I'm posting on the broad theme of Museums & Monuments Across the World - mostly those I've been to and a few on my bucket list that I haven't been able to visit yet. Museums are one of my favourite ways to get to know a culture, they sum up what those peoples want to preserve and pass onto their grandchildren, the facets they want to show their foreign visitors, how they perceive, present and preserve their own storyline and that of their interactions with the world. Come museum hopping with me!

Y is for York Railway Museum

Today I'm retracing steps to my 2007 trip to UK - years ago now - which I mentioned for my X post as well. The driving force behind that trip was to take our young son to the UK, to introduce him to the places I'd visited and loved as a child as well as introduce him to family who lived there. Therefore, our entire touring itinerary was child-friendly - it included the Railway Museum in York, the Maritime Museum in Falmouth (also Cadbury World in Birmingham) and so on, because he has been obsessed with trains, ships, cars and moving machinery parts practically since birth. 

Anyway, he was so taken with the Rail Museum that we spent all our days in York at it, mornings and afternoons. I had to squeeze the York Minster in a quick one hour hurricane dash, in between NRM visits spent looking at rail vehicles of every description possible. Not a hardship. But  left to myself, I would have chosen to see the other parts of the city as well. Sadly, the photos of the Museum  have vanished, it was a time of transition between regular film and digital for me and everything except this one is lost. 

View from our perch on Exhibition Square, Part of De Grey Rooms opposite
can be seen, Bootham Bar  (gate) and part of the city walls. The York Minster
is in  the background. Pit  stop on the  way back  from the  Railway Museum.

The Rail Museum in York holds over a hundred locomotives and millions of objects, including documents, linked to the history of rail transportation, around 6000-8000 of which are on display at any particular time. The exhibition space includes the Great Hall where some of those iconic engines can be viewed, if I recall correctly. Here is a current top ten list of must see/do items from the museum itself. The Museum has engines like the Mallard and is probably the only one to hold a Shinkansen engine (Bullet train) outside of Japan. It has undergone a huge refurbishment and expansion of its spaces since our visit. 

The York Rail Museum is the largest one in the world and is naturally one of the top rated visitor attractions in the UK outside of London. It gets around 7-800,000 visitors annually at present, I'm not sure what those numbers were like in 2007 but I recall it was busy and seemed to be very popular. Lots of kiddies thrilled to  bits with the Thomas the Tank Engine displays and memorabilia, including my son. 

York itself is a historic city. with a rich Roman and Viking past and therefore  draws significant volume of tourists numbering some 10 million annually.  There are several other museums and monuments that are worth exploring - Jorvik Viking Centre, York Castle Museum and of course the  York Minster. 

Read more about the NRM, York by clicking this link here. 

York Minster

The York Minster is an Anglican cathedral in the Early English Gothic style, the seat of the Archbishop of York, the second highest office of the Church of England. It has been a site of worship from before the Anglican Church became Anglican, from the 7th century onwards and legends claim from Roman times in the early centuries of Christianity itself. However, there is limited archaeological proof of Roman Christianity in Britain. 

The first evidence dates back to the 7th century when a wooden church was built at the site. Little of that remains. The name Minster is also from the same Anglo Saxon period, before the Norman conquest in 1066. Between the 7th and 11th century the church was damaged by fire, as well as by Danish invaders and pillagers and was rebuilt several times, near the current site if not at the same. The lofty building that is there today dates from the 13th century when the Norman Archbishop undertook to build a new cathedral. The work went on till the 15th century.

The York Minster is famous for being one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in Europe, it is also well known for its stained glass, that those windows are intact is a wonder and they are  an important survival from the medieval period.  Read more about the windows and their stained glass by clicking the link here. Overall it's not just a historic building but also a magnificent one and it attracts over half a million people every year, both worshippers and tourists. 

As I've said above I didn't get enough time there, mothers of young children rarely do get enough time anywhere! Plus the building was under renovation when I visited  - some areas weren't open at the time. Given half a chance, I'd go back for a good long  nose around.  

Read more about the York Minster by clicking the link here and here. 

The York Castle Museum, which I haven't been to, also sounds rather interesting (apart from the archaeological/historical stuff, their holdings include the story of Rowntree, a cocoa/confectionery works that was started in 1860s). Rowntree produced my childhood chocolate staples of Smarties, Quality Street and Kit Kat. These brands were introduced in the 1930s, btw, and are still going strong approaching nearly a century. Rowntree was taken over by Nestle sometime back in the 1980s/90s.  York's growth story remains underpinned by that factory, one of the key Brit cities that grew not on coal or steel or textiles, but on chocolate. Yum! - no?

~~~

Thank you for visiting and reading. As we near the end, I hope you've had a wonderful A-Z if you've taken the Challenge and a wonderful April if you've not!

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2026