York is one of the richest, complex townscapes in the world. People are drawn from across the world by its beauty, vitality and quality of life – Yorkness. Enhancing this essential quality of the city is crucial to York’s future as a thriving city.
York Civic Trust has produced a design guide to provide broad, helpful guidance to inform the development of the city through encouraging the developers, architects and builders to produce designs of great thought and care as well as asking what good design means to the people of York.
The development of the guide has been led by a member of the Civic Trust’s Environment Committee – John Stevens, a retired town planner, working other other volunteer professional specialists and Civic Trust staff.
The Design Guide is the first element in a much broader Civic Trust initiative to try and understand what ‘Yorkness’ means to people. It is a word often quoted by developers but has never been defined and may well mean very different things to different people.