York

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York is a beautiful walled city with a fascinating history from Roman times, through Viking invasions, and mediaeval machinations of the Wars of the Roses. I hadn't realised that the House of York has nothing to do with York, but is mainly the more southerly aristocratic families. The people of York would have supported the Lancastrians. I visited the Richard III experience in Monkbar, (a tower and gate in the wall) and the Henry VII experience further along the wall in Mickelgate). They had a film show of the human remains found in the Leicestershire car park, showing the reaction of the archaeologists when they got confirmation of the DNA match proving it was the remains of Richard III. (I think Leicester deserve to keep the remains as York has enough history of its own and I expect Leicester needs a little more). A combined ticket for the two exhibitions was £3-50 which was pretty reasonable considering a visit to York Minster Cathedral was £10 (no I didn't pay this, there's as much to see on the outside of the cathedral, which is free). Jane didn't do any of these, she did some people watching and sampled coffee in several cafes.
We got a hop-on hop-off bus tour, with buses that come along every ten minutes, and had a guided walking tour which gave us a potted history of the city and the buildings. I loved walking round on the top of the wall which goes around about half of the city, giving good views of all of it, and is easier than threading the way through the town. All the streets are higgledy piggledy, which means I get lost easily.
We went to a cold war bunker which was fascinating. Built in 1961 and decommissioned in 1991. For those years a 120-strong volunteer force of the Royal Observer Corps (ROC) rehearsed and trained for the possibility of a nuclear attack, in which case the first 60 volunteers would get in, along with a couple of engineers who would be coerced in. They would man the bunker for 30 days, taking it in turns to run outside every eight hours to change the light sensitive apparatus showing how far away the blast was, how hot it was, and how much radioactive fallout was around. The information would be passed on to headquarters who would monitor the situation. With limited water supplies the 60 volunteers didn't wash for the 30 days, and ‘hot bedded’ for the duration. Sewage waste was dealt with by blasting it out of the bunker with enough force to blow off the manhole cover in the adjacent carpark, as it was assumed that the main drains may have suffered damage from the bombing. The guide said he had met a few of the ROC volunteers and they all had a rather macabre sense of humour, which is probably not surprising.
The bunker was the last of its kind in the UK and consequently has a grade 1 listing, the same as Stonehenge.

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