York Minster: Caring for a Heritage Estate

Heritage Open Days is England’s largest festival of history and culture, bringing together over 2,000 local people and organisations, and thousands of volunteers. Every year in September, places across the country throw open their doors to celebrate their heritage, community and history. It’s your chance to see hidden places and try out new experiences – and it’s all FREE.

This year the YCCC will be hosting a small number of walking tours in York’s historic centre, to showcase the city’s heritage and our members’ diverse craft and conservation experience. Due to ongoing uncertainty around the impact of Covid-19, we have limited our participation this year to Saturday 18th September and will be restricting group numbers for each tour to 15. We hope that you can join us for these fascinating talks!

You can find out more by visiting the Heritage Open Days site, or click below to register through Eventbrite (please note that some tickets may not be available until after 5th August).

This walking tour with the Minster’s Director of Works & Precinct will give a ‘behind the scenes’ talk on the emerging plans and the complicated nature of caring for a heritage estate of this scale and complexity.

York Minster has recently submitted its Neighbourhood Plan, a document which sets out the policies for the future care of York Minster and its Precinct, to City of York Council to begin the statutory adoption process. This is the first time the future care and development of a heritage estate has been brought forward as a Neighbourhood Plan. Once adopted, the York Minster Precinct Neighbourhood Plan will form part of the statutory development plan framework for the City of York and will carry significant weight in decision making on future planning applications.

Through this tour of the Minster precinct, Alex McCallion, Director of Works & Precinct will explain how the proposed plans have been guided by over three years’ work to identify locations where appropriate development should take place, to provide the facilities needed to support the functioning of the Minster in the 21st century. Alex will also explore how the plans respond to wider policies related to the Minster’s public realm and movement routes, the historic environment and landscape.

Because of the complicated nature of the Precinct, the medieval masterpiece that is York Minster, and the attachment people from all over the world have for the Minster, the Neighbourhood Plan must offer a credible route map to delivering the vision for the next 15 years. This tour offers the chance to find out more about this historic space, and the emerging vision for its future.

Click here to find out more about this event on the Heritage Open Days site.