Stand on Lendal Bridge on a weekday morning and count what crosses it. Depending on the hour, the bicycles give the cars a genuine run for their money: commuters, parents with kids in cargo bikes, at least one person balancing a week's shopping with the confidence of a circus act. York has been one of Britain's great cycling cities for decades, largely because a medieval street plan is fantastically hostile to cars and fantastically kind to anything narrower than a horse.

But the green story here is bigger than bikes, and most of it never makes headlines, which is exactly why we're writing about it.

The Strays: a medieval idea that turned out to be genius

York has something almost no other English city has: the Strays. Hundreds of acres of open common land (Knavesmire, Bootham Stray, Monk Stray, Walmgate Stray) wrapped around the city like a green scarf, protected for centuries by ancient grazing rights held by the Freemen of York. What began as somewhere to put your cattle became, almost by accident, one of the great urban green space networks in the country.

The result: you can stand in the middle of Knavesmire, ten minutes' walk from a railway station, and see nothing but grass, sky and, for a few glorious weeks in spring, drifts of wildflowers where the mowers deliberately don't go. The medieval commoners weren't thinking about biodiversity corridors. They just wanted somewhere for the cows. Sometimes the best planning is nine hundred years of not building on something.

Sometimes the best environmental policy is nine hundred years of stubbornly refusing to build on the grass.

The nature reserve that used to be a tip

Our favourite green story in the city is St Nicholas Fields (St Nicks to everyone), a genuine nature reserve a mile from the Minster, built on what was for decades a municipal rubbish tip. Local volunteers spent years turning landfill into meadow, scrub and woodland; today it's home to butterflies, birds and an environment centre, with the whole thing run as a community charity.

Think about that trajectory: the city literally threw things away there for generations, and the response of a group of York residents was to plant it, path it and hand it back to everyone as a wild green common. If this site has a patron saint, it might be St Nicks.

Small city, short distances, big advantage

York's secret green weapon is its size. Almost everything is within a couple of miles of everything else, which means the low-carbon option is usually also the convenient option. The park-and-ride ring keeps thousands of cars out of the centre every day. The riverside paths along the Ouse and Foss double as commuter routes. The flat Vale of York terrain means cycling here requires enthusiasm rather than fitness. Greener choices stick when they're also simply easier, and in York, more often than not, they are.

Green York, in brief

What you can actually do

Green news often ends with a guilt trip. Not here; this is the good-news website. So instead, three genuinely pleasant suggestions: walk the Foss island path and count the herons; take a picnic to whichever Stray is nearest and sit in the long grass like a Victorian; and next time the journey is under two miles, try it by bike and see if it isn't quicker door-to-door. None of this is a sacrifice. That's rather the point.

The city that's been continuously lived in for nearly two thousand years is quietly arranging to be liveable for the next two thousand. No fireworks, no fuss. Just green shoots, everywhere you look, and swans with right of way. Speaking of which: let's talk about how friendly this place is.