York

The largest gothic cathedral in northern Europe, five hundred years in the building, holding the greatest single expanse of medieval stained glass in the country in its Great East Window. Go down to the undercroft to stand on the Roman and Norman foundations it was built over, and climb the central tower if your legs allow. Mobbed by day, so come early.

Best shot The two west towers floodlit at blue hour, or the Chapter House vault shot straight up.

• Touristy

The stone keep on its steep mound is what survives of York Castle, and the site of one of the darkest nights in English history. In 1190 the city’s entire Jewish community, besieged here by a mob, died in the tower, many by their own hand rather than be taken. A plaque at the foot remembers them. Climb it for the view over the city, but know what you are standing on.

The most complete medieval street in Britain, timber-framed houses leaning in until the upper floors nearly touch overhead. Once the street of butchers, now mostly gift shops, but at dawn before the crowds it is pure fourteenth century. Duck into the snickelways off it to lose the tour groups.

Best shot The overhanging timber frontages almost meeting overhead, empty at first light.

• Touristy

A Victorian garden cemetery gone half wild beyond the walls, all leaning headstones, ivy and a ruined classical chapel, kept just tended enough by the trust that runs it. Well out of the centre and almost always empty. A long, good wander.

Best shot The ruined chapel and ivy-swallowed graves under bare winter trees.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A medieval church hidden behind a row of shops, reached through a gate off Goodramgate, with a floor that rolls like a sea, rare surviving box pews and old clear glass. Almost nobody finds it. Push the door, sit down, and have the fifteenth century to yourself.

Best shot The crooked box pews and plain leaded windows in flat daylight.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A half-buried 1960s monitoring bunker on a suburban street, where volunteers would have tracked nuclear fallout over Yorkshire, left exactly as it was when it closed in 1991: bunks, dosimeters, decontamination room and all. English Heritage runs timed tours. Bleak, fascinating, and nothing like the rest of York.

Best shot The operations room and its wall of dials and maps under bare strip light.

• Solo-friendly

A quiet medieval church across the river, best known for its stained glass, above all the Pricke of Conscience window: a fifteenth-century vision of the world’s last fifteen days told pane by pane. Doom, in glass, six hundred years old.

Best shot The Pricke of Conscience window backlit, its fifteen panes of the end of the world.

• Quiet

The tall broken arches of a Benedictine abbey wrecked at the Dissolution, standing in the Museum Gardens by the river. Free to wander, gently melancholy, and floodlit after dark.

Best shot The ruined nave arches against the sky, best at dusk or floodlit.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A handsome townhouse behind the Minster, packed with antiques by an Edwardian collector, and famous for a 1953 sighting of a column of Roman soldiers marching through the cellar, visible only from the knees up, where the old road once ran. The National Trust plays it completely straight, which somehow makes it worse.

• Quiet

A rambling house tucked behind the Minster with parts dating to 1091, said to be the oldest continuously occupied dwelling in the country: creaking galleries, panelling and a long Jacobean room upstairs. Sleep in history, drink in the garden under the city walls.

• Quiet
• Adults only

A William III country house in walled gardens south of the centre, all oak, old portraits and firelight, run by the National Trust. Grandly hushed, a taxi from town, and worth it for a fire and a whisky.

• Quiet
• Adults only

A Georgian townhouse in the centre, once home to the assize judges, with dark panelling and a cellar bar under stone vaults. Central, handsome and a little stern, as a judge’s house should be.

• Quiet

York’s oldest coaching inn and, it will tell you at length, its most haunted: a wonky sixteenth-century pub with floors that slope and a full roster of resident ghosts. Touristy and it knows it, but the rooms are genuinely old and genuinely crooked. Good for a pint and a shiver.

• Adults only
• Touristy

The smallest and least-changed pub in York, a tiny Edwardian interior of etched glass and dark wood barely wide enough to pass along. No music, no food past a pie, just proper cask ale and quiet. A gem.

• Solo-friendly

A dark, gaslit-feeling inn right under the Minster, on the spot where Guy Fawkes was born in 1570. Low beams, open fires, candles on the tables. Lean into the gunpowder theme or just take one of the moodiest rooms in the city.

• Adults only

A cluttered, dim cocktail warren up a narrow Stonegate staircase, strong drinks, junk-shop decor and a bottle shop stacked to the ceiling. Loud and packed at weekends, brilliant on a quiet weeknight.

• Adults only
• Party scene

A tiny shop on the Shambles selling one thing: small handmade ghosts, each one different, in a beautifully strange candlelit room that is half shop, half museum. Expect a queue, and expect to leave with a ghost in your pocket.

• Solo-friendly
• Touristy

An antiquarian bookshop trading since 1948, floor to ceiling with old and rare books and prints. The kind of place to lose an hour and leave with something you did not know you wanted.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A crooked secondhand bookshop on several floors in the shadow of the Minster, creaking stairs, stacked shelves and the smell of old paper. Antiquarian upstairs, bargains down.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet