Alternative York

Within these pages you’ll find the story of the York “they” don’t want to tell you about. Music, poets, : football and beer along with fights RK for women’s rights and Gay YO Liberation – just the story of AWALK another Friday night in York in fact! ONTHEWILDSIDE tales of riot, rebellion and revolution Paul Furness In association with the York Alternative History Group 23 22 24 ate ierg 20 Coll 21 e at 25 rg The Minster te Pe w 19 Lo 13 12 et 18 Stre 14 Blake y 17 one 15 C t ree 16 St St at R io o n ad York: The route oss r F ive lly R 3 t di e a 2 e cc r Pi t 5 S Clifford’s 4 r e w Tower o 1 T 26 Finish Start e t a g e s u O h g i H 11 6 e gat River Ouse lder Ske 7 e t a r g io l en e ill S k oph c h i Bis M 8 10 9 Contents Different Cities, Different Stories 4 Stops on the walk: 1 A bloody, oppressive history… 6 2 Marching against ‘Yorkshire Slavery’ 9 3 Yorkshire’s Guantanamo 10 4 Scotland, the Luddites and Peterloo 12 5 The judicial murder of General Ludd 14 6 “Shoe Jews” and the Mystery Plays 16 7 Whatever happened to Moby Dick? 18 8 Sex and the City 19 9 The Feminist Fashionista! 21 10 The York Virtuosi 23 11 Gay’s the Word! 24 12 Poets Corner 27 13 Votes for Women! 29 14 Where there’s muck… 30 15 Doctor Slop and George Stubbs 32 16 Hey Hey Red Rhino! 33 17 It’s not all Baroque and Early Music! 35 18 A Clash of Arms 36 19 An Irish Poet and the Yorkshire Miners 37 20 Racism treads the boards 38 21 Lesbian wedding bells! 40 22 The World Turned Upside Down 43 23 William Baines and the Silent Screen 45 24 Chartism, football and beer… 46 25 An American and Karl Marx 48 26 Shakespeare’s Yorkshire Tragedy and another drunken tale 50 Afterword 52 p3 Different Cities, Different Stories… In Alan Bennett's Talking Head “A Northerners have been shipped out Chip in the Sugar”, Graham's mother to Selby and the suburbs, which is visits York and tells him that nothing where all the better shops are? has changed – it’s the same as it Meanwhile, those mean streets of ever was - which is the popular and the inner city which they left behind old-fashioned image that the tourist have become a dumping ground for chiefs want to sell us hook, line and the southern middle class who, with sinker about this town. Walking not a Cockney or an Essex drawl along the elegant, 19th century among their shrill Hertfordshire Clifford Street, and then turning left whines, you will hear squealing with into Tower Street, there was – until barely concealed delight about how recently - a signpost pointing you in lucky they are to be living in lovely the direction of the Castle Museum York. Part of the sequestering of which read “Victorian Street – this this brash Yorkshire capital is a way”. Regardless of the fact that you sanitisation of its history and an had just strolled down a blisteringly ignorance of its past. No scandalous good example of one, this sign is but poets for them or the likes of Guy one indication of the branding – or Fawkes either – it’s all Dick Turpin maybe that should be blanding – of A-Go-Go these days! York has been the Olde Worlde City of York. As if the reduced to a city of drab, makeshift gorgeous reality of the place was not festivals that encourage everyone to enough to bring people here by the dress up as Romans or Vikings and thousand, the movers and shakers, live off expensive chocolate the great and the good – for which handouts. A manager at one such you should read the well-off and the tasty attraction once told me that mediocre – are all in it together visitors to York “are surprised about when it comes to selling an idolatrous its connections with chocolate – no image of York. John Barry, the man one knows it’s made here”. Well, who wrote “Goldfinger” and most of pardon me for biting off a chunk, but the other James Bond theme tunes, all anyone has to do is look at a Kit- said that the city he was born in was Kat wrapper or sniff the air for burnt among the most beautiful in the cocoa at certain times of the week to world but that it was as dull as ditch realise that York is, in the words of water, too. The novelist Kate the immortal John Cooper Clark, Atkinson, who was born and brought Candy Town. And so with the rest of up in Stonegate, said that most of it...It’s all getting a little like if the cap the people she grew up with no fits in this part of Yorkshire and, at longer use the centre of town. And times, it feels as if we are drowning why should they, when the chippy in an enormous pile of slightly soiled p4 antique lace. Yet walk through those same streets on a weekend or when This is one whopper of an the races are on and it all comes alive again – that magical, foul- urban stroll to do in one go mouthed raucous enjoyment of life and you may want to split that is what this old city is really all about. it into two or even three So why do we know so little manageable sections. But about York, one of the best- documented and most photographed you can do the whole thing cities in Europe? The stories in this if you want to. Walk it as lucky bag of a little book are in part an answer to that neglect and are you like. Few of the stops not told for keeping up appearances are marked by plaques so in order to market York's very pay attention to what’s saleable past [where are trading standards when you need them?] around you as you go: that’s but are, instead, those of people the whole point! who tried to make the world we live in a better place for all of us to wander around - and not just to sell We start this walk at us a shed load of twinkling tourist tat while we are at it. Clifford’s Tower, the most substantial part of York Enjoy! Castle still to stand. p5 WALK stop 1 A bloody, oppressive history… Clifford’s Tower - see map p8 The four buildings that surround the tragic. The city had a large Jewish circular Eye of York – Clifford’s Tower, community, with many homes in the Law Courts, the Debtors Prison and Jubbergate, a Synagogue in Coney the Female Prison [both of which are Street and a cemetery north of the city now the Castle Museum] and the bits of walls at Jewbury. Josce and Benedict the main gateway and walls facing the were two Jewish merchants from York river Foss, behind the museum - are all who were in London for the coronation that remain of the once mighty York of Richard I when these riots broke out Castle. Built for William the Conqueror, – and they had to leave quick. Benedict it was one of two castles, one on each got as far as Northampton, where he side of the river Ouse – the other was tortured and forced to convert to survives today as a lovelorn, overgrown Christianity. He didn't survive and, back lump called Baile Hill at the end of in York, racist mobs rampaged through Skeldergate. The Norman Conquest the streets and murdered his widow and didn't take place here until 1069, three children. Josce, who made it home years after that of England, when York – safely, then led his community to seek the cosmopolitan capitol city of a refuge in Clifford’s Tower. What started country with its own language and out as a place of refuge became, over culture called Northumbria – was the coming week, one of captivity until destroyed during the Harrying of the on Friday 16 March – the Sabbath Eve North. William celebrated Christmas Day before the feast of Passover – the 150 that year by lounging in a throne on the men, women and children under siege battlements of Clifford’s Tower and, his were dead. While we don’t know for golden crown glinting in the winter sun, certain what happened next, later watched as the city below him was reports suggest they may have killed torched. Throughout Yorkshire, William themselves. The last man standing then unleashed a reign of terror during which set fire to the wooden Tower. The few an estimated 100,000 people were who survived this onslaught were massacred. It wasn't just humans that hunted down and slaughtered. Although were destroyed. Farms and livestock the Jewish community in York did were obliterated, too, and the land salted return, they were forced out again to prevent crops being grown for decades when the entire Jewish population of to come. Famine followed and, when the England was deported in 1290 – they Domesday Book was written in 1086 – were only allowed back in 1656, after almost 20 years afterwards - most of the monarchy was abolished. Although Yorkshire was still recorded as “waste”.

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