Fair question. It started, like most good York stories, with someone getting the wrong end of the stick.
You're on holiday. Someone asks where you're from. You say “York” and watch their face light up: “Oh wow, New York?!”
No. The old one. The original one. The walled city in Yorkshire that the Romans built in 71 AD, that the Vikings made their capital, and that, in 1664, quietly lent its name to a little settlement across the Atlantic that went on to do rather well for itself.
We've all had that conversation a hundred times. Somewhere along the way, instead of being mildly annoyed by it, we decided to lean in. If the whole world hears “York” and thinks of the wrong city, then the wrong city's name is the best doorway there is to the right one.
“Y'all”, the warmest hello in the English language, plus “New York”, the city that borrowed our name. Put together, it's a friendly wave to everyone who ever got the two mixed up: come and meet the York that came first.
Read it again, slower: Y'all · New · York. This is a site about what's new in the original York. New openings, new green spaces, new kindnesses, new reasons to love a very old city. The name was sitting there the whole time; we just had to squint at it.
The Ninth Legion pitches up where the Ouse meets the Foss and founds Eboracum. Emperors visit. One, Constantine the Great, is proclaimed emperor right here in 306 AD. Not a bad start.
Eboracum becomes Jórvík, capital of the Viking north and one of the great trading cities of Europe. Say “Jórvík” fast a few hundred times over a few hundred years and you get…
The name settles. The city thrives: second city of medieval England, home to the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe, and the reason a certain royal title exists at all.
The English take the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and rename it in honour of James, Duke of York. A duke titled after our city. Which makes New York, in a very real sense, named after York. You're welcome, Manhattan.
yallnewyork.org launches: an independent good-news site for the original York. The domain raises an eyebrow. Then it starts the exact conversation it was named after. Every time.
There's plenty of news that makes you feel worse. This site has one job: to be the corner of the internet where York makes you feel better.
Not because bad news doesn't exist, but because everyone else already covers it. If a story doesn't leave you a little fonder of York, we don't publish it. Simple as.
Written in York by people who live here, walk the walls, queue for the coffee and know which snickelway floods when it rains. No content farms, no outsourcing, no AI-written sludge about a city the writer's never seen.
No paywall, no clickbait, no council press releases in a trench coat. We're volunteer-run and answer to nobody except the readers, and possibly the swans.
We're a handful of York locals: writers, walkers, coffee enthusiasts and one person who genuinely knows an alarming amount about Roman drainage. Between us we've lived here for decades, and we kept having the same chat in the pub: why is all local news so miserable?
So we built the thing we wanted to read. A site that treats York the way York treats visitors: warmly, generously, and with at least one story about a snickelway.
If you'd like to write for us, tip us off about something lovely, or just say ey up, the door's always open.