England Guide
Yorkshire
It's easy to be glib about Yorkshire – for much of the country, England's largest county is shorthand for "up north" and all its clichéd connotations, from flat caps and factories to tightfisted locals. For their part, many Yorkshire born-and-bred are happy to play to the prejudice of southerners, adopting an attitude roughly on a par with that of Texans or Australians in strongly suggesting that there's really nowhere else worth considering. In its sheer size at least, Yorkshire does have a case for primacy, while its most striking characteristics – from dialect to landscape – derive from a long history of settlement, invention and independence that's still a source of pride today.
The number-one destination is undoubtedly history-soaked York, for centuries England's second city until the Industrial Revolution created new centres of power and influence. York's mixture of medieval, Georgian and Victorian architecture is mirrored in miniature in the Dales town of Richmond, while the Yorkshire coast, too, retains something of its erstwhile grandeur – Scarborough boomed in the nineteenth century and again in the postwar period, though its in smaller resorts like Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay that the best of the coast is to be found today.
The engine of growth during the Industrial Revolution was not in the north of the county, but in the south and west, where Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield and their satellites were once the world's mightiest producers of textiles and of steel. Ruthless economic logic devastated the area in the twentieth century, but a new vigour has infused South and West Yorkshire during the last decade, and the city-centre transformations of Leeds and Sheffield in particular have been remarkable, while Bradford waylays people on their way to Haworth, home of the Brontë sisters. The Yorkshire Dales, to the northwest, form a patchwork of stone-built villages, limestone hills, serene valleys and majestic heights. The county's other National Park, the North York Moors, is divided into bleak upland moors and a tremendous rugged coastline between Robin Hood's Bay and Staithes.
Highlights
1 Millennium Gallery, Sheffield Centrepiece of revamped Sheffield – terrific exhibitions with hothouse gardens attached.
2 Shopping in Leeds Shop till you drop in the markets, malls and arcades of Yorkshire's most fashionable city. See Victoria Quarter
3 National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford A hands-on museum for couch potatoes and film fans of all ages.
4 Haworth Visit the bleak moorland home of the Brontë sisters.
5 Malham Make the breathtaking hike from Malham village to the glorious natural amphitheatre of Malham Cove.
6 Jorvik, York Travel through time to discover the sights, sounds and smells of Viking York.