How to get there

England is well-connected by a railway network. Once you fly either to Heathrow or Gatwick airport in London, you can take a tube to King’s Cross station and take a train to York. Alternatively, if you fly to the Manchester airport, you can take a taxi to the station and take a train to York. York is a two-hour train ride away from London and Manchester. The York station is only a twenty-minute walk from the city centre. The city of York is also well-connected by buses.

Best places to eat

Don’t miss the famous traditional tearooms of York where tea is served all day in the old British style. York’s oldest tearoom is Betty’s Café-Tearoom (established in 1919). The pubs of York serve traditional breakfasts and dinners; good choices would be The Three-Legged Mare on High Petergate, The Blue Bicycle on Walmgate or The Priory on Micklegate. If you’re interested in nice restaurants for a quiet sit-down dinner, try Russel’s Restaurant on Coppergate, The Rose and the Crown on Main Street or the Victoria on Heslington Road.

Best time to visit

York is alive all through the year, but tends to be very cold from November to March. The rest of the year is lovely. If you’re interested in the Illuminating York festival or any of the Christmas fairs, October is a great time to visit York.

York: the ancient Northern capital of England… its most historic settlement… the home of the Romans, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons…

In my early explorations of York, I found that when travel guides say that York is a walled city, they actually mean that York is a walled city. The city centre, outside of which are most residential areas, is fortified on all sides, and you enter the city through gatehouses or bars. There are four main bars and several minor ones that lead into York, and you can climb up the bars, on to the walls and walk around the city on the walls. You can peer into the city from the top of these walls, or peer upwards and see the glorious sight of the Yorkminster Cathedral.

Rivalling the Westminster Abbey in terms of beauty, the Yorkminster sort of makes you forget everything around you. In York, no building is permitted to be taller than the Yorkminster, and therefore, no matter where you are, you allow it to be your pole star and to guide you, in its reassuring way, out of the wrong left turn that you keep taking. But getting lost in York is a bit of a bonus, because an extra half hour of walking only means an extra half hour of beauty.

The Yorkminster defines your nights, though, more than it defines your days. When lit up in pale yellow incandescent lights, the Yorkminster springs suddenly alive, grander and more loquacious than ever, beckoning you into its warm, inviting glow, sort of teasing you a little with its presence. If anything can make you forget the biting cold of your surroundings at night, it is this sight.

There is always plenty to do in the nights: I went for one of York's famous ghost-walks (York has about eight different ghost walks), where a man, covered almost entirely in blood, took us through the town in the middle of the night and introduced us to all its ghosts, making us do the most absurd things to invoke the ghosts and creating an atmosphere that was both hilarious and eerie at once.

Every October, York celebrates the end of the season with the Illuminating York festival, when the city is lit up in the nights, and various activities take place through the town. This year, amongst other things, the Yorkminster was lit up in various colours that follow the patterns of sounds made into microphones that hang in the area. As someone who walks to the Yorkminster in the middle of the night even when no such thing is happening, I turned up every night of the festival to stare unabashedly at the play of light. But despite the colourful pageantry of Illuminating York, I prefer the warm glow of the every-night Yorkminster and its intimate surroundings.

And if my nights have been about the Yorkminster, my days in the city have undoubtedly been about the Shambles, the tiny medieval street that has a story to tell you with every step you take. The Shambles is narrow, lined romantically with cobblestone and has a way of packing a million things into a small amount of space. Little Shambles is its extension, a tiny yard that houses a market everyday where the most extraordinary things are sold. In fact, the city has little markets in every pocket, with musicians playing on the streets all day long, various street-performers, artists, carousels and ‘fayres’ (the archaic spelling of ‘fairs’). The most alive markets are the ones in Little Shambles, Parliament Square and Coppergate.

There are several little alleys in York, that form parts of the passageways of the old forts, and they’re called snickelways. The shortest snickelway in York is The Hole in the Wall and the longest is Coffee Yard. Other snickelways include Mad Alice Lane, Pope’s Head Alley and the intriguing Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma Gate lane, which leads to Colliergate and the Shambles.

At some point, when you grow tired of the noisy bustle of the markets, you will veer towards the Yorkminster automatically; go a little further down and visit the Museum Gardens, where you will find the ruins of an old church, the Yorkshire Museum and a landscape that will take your breath away. Take the walking trail, and it will ultimately lead you to the Ouse bank walk, where you can see the white swans first make their appearance. The Ouse bank walk, if you can ever tear yourself away from the gardens, will take you all the way down the river on a mossy, picturesque path to the famous railway museum of York, the largest railway museum in the world.

One of the things you cannot miss at York is the Jorvik Viking Museum, which is actually the excavation site of a real Viking village. The entire village is reconstructed and the ambience of the place is just fantastic. Also visit the Merchant’s Adventurer’s Hall, the oldest guildhall in England, Treasure’s House, the Castle Museum, the Yorkshire Museum, Clifford’s Tower, the stronghold where thousands of Jews put themselves to death in 1190, and Fairfax House, the beautifully-preserved Georgian house with its famous collection of clocks. In fact, if you’re interested in English history, York is the place to begin.

York is much more old-fashioned than most other places in England, and this quaintness adds to its charm, particularly since all the buildings and walls and even shops look so old. It is the sort of place you will always return to, because there's the nagging feeling at the back of your mind that though you've seen so much, you may still have seen only a small part of all that there is to see.