It is a beautiful day in York. Above my head, the magnificent spires of York Minster; on the ground children run past, giddy on the last dregs of their school holidays. But the serenity of the moment does not last long. “The church is being repaired with money linked to the slave trade,” says Charlie Cayzer, my 23-year-old tour guide.
A few minutes later we walk past the Shambles, York’s medieval cobbled street lined with timber-framed buildings that may have inspired Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. “This used to be a butcher’s street, it’s sloped so blood and guts would run down it,” Cayzer says cheerfully, among the tourists taking photographs.
This is tourism but not as you know it. My guide works for Uncomfortable Cities, a company launched by doctoral students in Oxford in 2018 to challenge conventional historical narratives. Typical topics include sexism, colonialism and race discrimination — like a “woke” Horrible Histories.
The company has expanded fast. An Uncomfortable Cities tour of Cambridge began last year and now, for £10, you can glimpse York chequered past. The focus in “chocolate city” is the cocoa trade, as well as the city’s famous philanthropic and business families, the Rowntrees, Terrys and Tukes — as well as gay rights and a massacre of Jews. What more could you want on a summer day?
Cayzer, a history student from Bristol, explains that “the purpose of the tour is to open up meaningful discussion”. A typical group will include a mix of students, tourists and families of all ages — plus a lot of retired local people keen for a new view of the city. It sounds like a recipe for a particularly annoying LBC radio discussion but, I reason, as long as no one brings up the Duchess of Sussex or trans rights, we should be OK.
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Cayzer points out the huge statue of the Roman emperor Constantine in the churchyard — and a placard saying “no busking”: the council discourages rough sleeping here. He mentions that the Church of England’s endowment fund had links with the South Sea Company, which traded slaves.
Next up is York’s Chocolate Story museum — according to TripAdvisor, the seventh best thing to do in the city. Cayzer says the museum receives funding from Nestlé and asks, “What stories do you think aren’t told in the museum?” Typical suggestions will be “child trafficking” and “slave labour”, Cayzer says. Guiltily, I realise that I am hungry. We walk past Bettys Café Tea Rooms, where I was taken by my grandfather as a child to enjoy a scone. I look uneasily at Charlie, who reassures me that Bettys is safe. For now.
Next we learn about Joseph Rowntree’s first shop, which sold tea, sugar and cocoa powder. “Where do you think they came from?” Cayzer leads. We learn that Rowntree financed a public park and swimming baths at the same time as his factories were using cocoa made by slaves. “Do you feel like this is hypocritical?” Cayzer asks. Then we go to Fairfax House, a Georgian townhouse museum, built and furnished at a time when the British Empire enriched such houses with treasures and luxury goods. What should we do with “problematic” items, Cayzer asks, should they be sent back?
Has it gone too far? Thank God there are no statues of Rowntree in sight. Paula Larsson, the group’s co-founder, insists that the tours are not just for millennials. “We’ve had many people with diverging opinions,” she says. People like the tours because they provoke debate: “Talking to strangers on the street is different to the polarised debates you get on the internet where there’s an anonymous aspect to it.”
The formula seems to be working. The company has grown to 60 people and is now developing tours in London and Paris.
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An hour and a half later the tour ends at Clifford’s Tower — an English Heritage site where tourists wield selfie sticks. Eight hundred years ago, 150 Jews took their own lives after being barricaded by an antisemitic mob. Many Jews still refuse to visit York. Of all the stops on the tour, it is the most sobering and poignant. “Our objective is to contextualise the past, not to shame it,” says Olivia Durand, another co-founder.
We walk back to York Minster through College Green and wait with bated breath. “I wanted to say something uncomfortable here,” Cayzer tells me, “but I couldn’t actually find anything that bad.”
This article was updated on August 30, 2023, to take account of the following correction: we wrongly said that repairs to York Minster were being funded by the Church of England’s investment in the South Sea Company, which traded slaves. In fact the repairs are entirely funded by the minster’s own income from ticket and retail sales, property lets, grants, donations and legacies. We are happy to make this clear.
