Day one in York: a very good day with one bad tour in it

That one bad thing had four wheels, glowing reviews and a bus full of people not laughing, so let's do this stop by stop and sort out what to book from what to walk straight past.

This was January 2024. Up at a genuinely unreasonable hour, in the car with my rollers still in, which is the level of glamour you can expect around here. Two nights, one city, and an unusually light amount of planning by our standards. Which still meant a list, obviously. Just a shorter one than normal. You can get away with that here, because you walk into a city you could just lose yourself in for hours.

First stop, Spark:York

Parked up, bags dropped at the hotel, and then a walk into town we’d happily do again. Spark:York is a food hall built out of shipping containers with a load of different independent traders in it, which is exactly the right shape for us, because we can never agree on one cuisine and this way nobody has to.

We kicked the afternoon off with pints from Turning Point and they were fantastic. Then arancini and chicken sandwiches, both excellent, from two different counters. Is there anything better than a food hall? Multiple bars and restaurants and only one search for a table.

Tip here, they keep the doors open so it’s not much warmer inside than out at lunchtime.

York’s Chocolate Story, £22.50 and worth it

Next up was York’s Chocolate Story, which was £22.50 each for a guided tour and a tasting.

I’ll be honest, I went in expecting a gift shop with a queue attached to the front of it. What we got instead was a genuinely interesting hour on how chocolate is actually made, and then a proper section on the supply chain problems the industry is sitting on right now. Where the beans come from, who gets paid what, why the price of a bar is doing what it’s doing. That’s the sort of thing you assume a tourist attraction will quietly skate over, and they didn’t, and it’s the reason the tour stuck with us.

The tasting is the bit everyone’s there for and it delivers. You work along a board from the milk stuff through to the very dark, with cocoa nibs to chew on in the middle, and the guide talks you through what you’re supposed to be picking up rather than just putting it down and walking off.

Four out of five. The missing star is purely that £22.50 each is not nothing when you’re already paying city prices for everything else that day. If chocolate is your thing, book it and enjoy yourself. If it’s a maybe, it’s a maybe.

Worth knowing before you pay at the door: the chocolate tour is one of the 30-odd attractions on the Visit York Pass, which is £93.82 an adult and throws in a hop-on hop-off bus. We didn’t have one, and having priced it up afterwards we’re glad. It needs five paid attractions across its two days before it starts making you money, which is why we only gave it a three out of five.

A free gin tasting, and nobody tried to sell us a thing

We walked past York Gin and couldn’t resist popping in, and it turned out to be a lovely little free highlight.

The staff couldn’t have been nicer and offered us plenty of samples. What’s even better is it was completely free. It’s nice to support a local business and buy from them if you like something, but there was absolutely no pressure. We actually didn’t buy anything that day and promised we’d go back the next day, because we didn’t want to carry a bottle around with us for the rest of the night, and there was still no pushy sales tactics.

Sit with that for a second, because it’s rarer than it should be. Six gins lined up on the counter, London Dry, Roman Fruit, Old Tom, Rhubarb, Chocolate & Orange and Outlaw, all of them poured for us by someone who clearly liked talking about them. Then we said “we’ll come back tomorrow” and they said lovely, see you tomorrow. No card machine appearing at the end, no “so which one will you be taking?”, nothing. We love a tasting. We’ll do one anywhere, three in a single Dublin day if you let us, and this one was free.

Five out of five for a free half hour. Go in, be nice to them, and buy something if you like it.

England’s most haunted inn

Did you know England’s most haunted inn is in York? We’re not telling you which one, because half the fun is stumbling across it yourself and York is small enough that you genuinely will.

What we will tell you is that they do a good pint. No ghosts turned up while we were in, but the beer was good, so we called it even.

Dinner at YUZU, inside Brew York

Dinner was YUZU street food, which lives inside Brew York. Bao buns, a plate of gyoza covered in sesame and spring onion, and a table full of small glasses because we couldn’t pick one beer between us.

Now here’s the surprise, and it’s a nice one for once. We’ve come across Brew York at beer festivals up and down the country and they’ve never quite been our favourite. Every single thing we drank in that taproom was fantastic. Same brewery, completely different verdict. I think the honest answer is just that beer is better where it’s made, and a festival tent on hour six is not a fair test of anyone.

Alex will tell you he’d been saying that for years. He had not.

The ghost bus tour we’d tell you to skip

Two out of five for £20 each, and I’m rounding up because the bus itself was quite a nice place to sit.

The Comedy Horror Show York Ghost Bus Tour was trying so hard to be funny that it fell completely flat. Nobody on that bus was laughing. Not a polite chuckle, not even a sympathetic groan, and there is genuinely no worse place to be than a sealed vehicle where somebody is doing material at you and it isn’t landing. A couple of the jokes were also just poor taste, which is a separate problem and a harder one to fix than the timing.

Save your money on this one is my honest advice. That’s £40 for the two of us, and £40 behind the bar at Brew York would have bought a far better evening.

I’ll be fair though, it does have good reviews, so plenty of people clearly get on with it far better than we did. If comedy horror is your sort of thing, don’t let me stop you. It just wasn’t ours, and we found out the next day that York does the same job far better: the York Dungeon got a five out of five from us.

The nightcap that rescued it

We salvaged the night with a nightcap in a bar we happened to walk past on the way back to the hotel, which is how most of our better decisions get made.

Big soft leather sofa, an enormous painting of a bike race pouring through one of the city gates on the wall behind us, and two very good cocktails. A lovely end to a genuinely excellent day.

Final verdict

Four out of five for day one, and the only thing dragging it down is the bus.

Here’s the shape of it. The one thing we’d warn you off was the one with the slickest marketing behind it, and the bits that made the day were a food hall, a taproom and a free half hour in a gin shop where nobody tried to sell us anything. That isn’t a coincidence, it’s just how a city like York works. The good stuff is small, independent, and standing right there on the street waiting for you to walk in.

York should absolutely be on your list for a UK weekend, whether that’s a couple, a group of mates or a family. If you’ve been weighing up a city break against one of the big organised weekenders, we’ve run that experiment the other way round and the Butlins Big Weekender cost us £380 to find out. York won, and it wasn’t close.

Day two was also excellent, and yes, we went back to York Gin like we promised. The single best thing of the whole weekend was the JORVIK Viking Centre, which got a full review of its own.

York day one FAQs

Is York’s Chocolate Story worth £22.50? Yes, if you like chocolate and you want to know how it’s actually made. We paid £22.50 each in January 2024 for the guided tour and tasting, and the section on the industry’s supply chain problems was more interesting than we’d expected. Four out of five.

Is the York Gin tasting free? It was completely free when we visited, with no pressure to buy afterwards. We tried six gins, left without buying anything that day, and nobody so much as raised an eyebrow.

Is the York Ghost Bus Tour worth doing? Not for us. Two out of five, and it was £20 each. The comedy fell flat and nobody on our bus was laughing, and a couple of the jokes were in poor taste. It does have good reviews though, so plenty of people disagree with us.

Where should we eat and drink in York? Spark:York for lunch if you can’t agree on one thing, and YUZU inside Brew York for dinner. Both were highlights, and the beer in the Brew York taproom was better than we’ve ever had it at a festival.

Do you need a car in York? We drove up, parked, and didn’t touch the car again until we left. Everything on this list is walkable from the centre.

How many days do you need in York? Two full days did us nicely for a first visit, and we still didn’t run out of things we wanted to do. Here’s what we did on day two.

Prices are what we paid in January 2024. Things move, so check before you book.