There has been a church on this spot since 627, and before that the Roman fortress of Eboracum had its headquarters building here — you can see the foundations of both, plus the Norman cathedral of 1080, in the Undercroft. The building you walk into is the Gothic one: begun about 1220, the south and north transepts first, the nave between 1291 and about 1350, the choir and east end from 1361, and the whole thing consecrated on 3 July 1472. It is one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe and it never had a monastery attached, which is why the medieval fabric survived the Dissolution largely intact.
The glass is the reason to come. Roughly half of all surviving medieval stained glass in England is in this one building. The Great East Window was glazed between 1405 and 1408 by John Thornton of Coventry under a signed contract, runs to 311 panels of Apocalypse and Genesis scenes and is about the area of a tennis court; the York Glaziers Trust took it apart, conserved it panel by panel and finished reinstalling it in 2018. In the north transept the Five Sisters are five lancets of grisaille glass of about 1260, the oldest complete window here. The west window of 1338 has heart-shaped tracery and is known as the Heart of Yorkshire.
Then look for: the kings’ screen across the choir entrance, later 15th century, carrying fifteen carved English kings from William I to Henry VI; the chapter house off the north transept, octagonal, built about 1260–96, roofed by a wooden vault with no central column and lined with carved heads and foliage under the canopies; and the roof bosses of the south transept, rebuilt after the lightning fire of 9 July 1984, six of them designed by Blue Peter viewers.
The Undercroft museum is included in the ticket: Roman barracks and basilica walls, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, the Norman foundations, the Horn of Ulf — a carved elephant-ivory drinking horn given with the land it stands on around 1030 — and the York Gospels of about 1020, still used in ceremonies.
The central tower is 275 steps, minimum age 8, and £6 on top of admission.
