53.9600°N / 1.0800°W · United Kingdom
A ring, and everything arranged around it. Inside, a tangle of streets that align with nothing; outside, the drawing changes completely.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
The ring is the first thing you see and it is worth saying exactly what draws it. There is no wall on this map: the line you read is the road that follows the ramparts, doubled by the band of grass on the earth bank beneath them. The effect is the same, and it is why York is recognisable at a glance, but the walls themselves are not a drawn thing here. One consequence: the medieval circuit has a gap in the north-east, where a marsh once made a wall unnecessary, and you will not see that gap, because the road runs on regardless.
Outside the ring, the pale open areas are the strays, common land the city is bound to keep open, and they are the reason the countryside seems to arrive at the town’s edge rather than fading into suburbs. The oval to the south-west is the racecourse on the Knavesmire. One naming note, since it is the classic mistake: in York the streets are the gates, from the Old Norse gata, and the fortified gateways are the bars. Micklegate is a street; Micklegate Bar is the gate at the end of it.
The real contrast here is stone against grass, which is unusual in a city plan and worth leaning into. Warm, light values suit the ground: the magnesian limestone of the walls and the stone of the Minster ask for a cream rather than a white, and the Victorian brick of the suburbs takes a quiet russet. Give the strays and the flood meadows a frank green, greener than you would normally allow in a town, because their scale is the point. The Ouse crosses everything as one dark ribbon.
Vertical, despite the wide format the open ground might suggest, because the green breaches lie north and south of the town and the portrait is what holds them. There is a real trade here. Come in closer and the ring commands the sheet, which is flattering, but the strays leave and the town becomes an island with nothing to be an island in. Pull back and the grass arrives, but the ring shrinks to a motif among suburbs. This framing sits at the point where both still read.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. The name of a bar, a street ending in gate, a date: that line is what turns a plan of York into your plan of York.
The fortress of Eboracum was founded around AD 71, a rectangle of some 21.5 hectares set near the bank of the Ouse. The site was chosen partly for the defence the two rivers gave it, at the point where the Ouse cuts through a glacial moraine in the otherwise flat Vale of York. That is the whole reason there is a city here at all: a piece of raised dry ground in a floodplain, with water on two sides. The Roman rectangle is not visible on the map, but its line is still under the modern centre.
In 1067, on William the Conqueror’s orders, a dam was raised on the Foss to flood the ditches of his new castle. It created a wide marshy lake, long known as the King’s Fishpool, and that water defended the north-east so effectively that no wall was ever built there. The circuit of York is therefore not a closed ring but an interrupted one, and the interruption is not a ruin or a demolition: it is a stretch that never existed.
York’s four strays, Bootham, Monk, Walmgate and Micklegate, cover 811 acres together, about 3.3 square kilometres of open ground. They are what remains of far larger commons, where the freemen of each quarter held grazing rights from time immemorial, and they took their present shape in the enclosure allotments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the city committed to keeping them open for ever. The Knavesmire, in Micklegate Stray, carries the racecourse. This is why the pale ground on this print runs right up to the old town instead of stopping at a ring road.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The stretch of wall you walked, the gate you came in by, the field you crossed to get home. The ring is the same for everyone. The way you went round it is not.
Compose my York print
