In 1976 the York Archaeological Trust was given five years to dig the Coppergate site before a shopping centre went on it. The ground turned out to be waterlogged and airless, which is the best luck an archaeologist can have: instead of the usual pottery and bone, the soil had kept wood, leather, textiles, seeds, insects and timber house-frames. More than 40,000 objects came out, along with the four narrow tenement plots running back from the street — a whole working block of 10th-century Jorvik, at a level of preservation almost unknown in Britain. The centre opened in April 1984 on the same footprint, and the reconstruction below is set out where the buildings actually stood.
The visit is in two halves. First the ride: capsule cars on a track through the rebuilt street, about sixteen minutes, past animatronic figures who talk to each other in Old Norse and in period-appropriate York accents, with the smells piped in. It is unashamedly a ride, and it is the reason children remember the place. Then the galleries, where roughly 800 of the excavated objects are shown properly in cases — silk from Byzantium, amber, a sock knitted by nålbinding, ice skates cut from horse bone, coin dies from the York mint, padlocks and keys.
Two things to look for. The Lloyds Bank coprolite is a fossilised human stool from a nearby York dig, one of the largest ever recovered and the single most-photographed object in the building. And the Coppergate Helmet here is a replica: the real 8th-century Anglian helmet, found on this site in 1982, is fifteen minutes’ walk away in the Yorkshire Museum. We would rather you knew that before you paid.
Practically: pre-booked timed slots are essential and it is genuinely an hour’s visit, not an afternoon. The centre is run by York Archaeology, the same charity that runs Barley Hall and DIG and that stages the JORVIK Viking Festival every February — a combined Pastport ticket covering three of their sites is sold alongside single admission. The building flooded on the Foss in December 2015 and reopened, rebuilt, in April 2017; the current ride and galleries date from that refit.
