Luxury dog-friendly hotels in York, United Kingdom

It may have once been second only to London in terms of size and prestige, but it’s now a surprisingly intimate place, in which all its major sights are easily within walking distance of each other. That’s not to say it’s easily navigable – the town planning is straight out of the Middle Ages, and crooked lanes, labyrinthine backstreets and higgledy-piggedly houses bent double with age seem designed to confuse and frustrate the tourists turning maps this way and that in the Shambles or outside the Minster. At the heart of almost every seminal period of English social and political life – the Viking invasion, the Wars of the Roses, the Reformation – York oozes history like AJP Taylor on a particularly hot day, but that’s not to say it’s backward-looking. There’s shopping, restaurants and cultural life that would put many larger cities to shame.