Locals have a complicated relationship with the Shambles. It's ours, but we share it with the world. On a summer Saturday you can barely move for photographs being taken; the street has been on more phone screens than most film stars. It would be very easy (very York, even) to be sniffy about it. And yet nobody actually is. Because the truth is that the Shambles has a trick it plays on everyone, resident and tourist alike, and the trick never wears off.

Walk in from the King's Square end. For the first few steps it's just a busy street. Then the buildings start to lean (really lean, fifteenth-century timber frames tilting towards each other like neighbours mid-gossip), the sky narrows to a bright ribbon, and the noise of the city goes muffled and small. That's the half-second. Everyone gets it. We've watched people stop dead in the middle of the street, mid-sentence, hit by six hundred years all at once.

A street built for a completely different job

The magic is an accident, which somehow makes it better. The Shambles wasn't designed to be beautiful; it was designed to sell meat. The name comes from shamels, the benches or stalls that butchers displayed their wares on; the street appears in the Domesday Book, making it comfortably over nine hundred years old as a trading address. The overhanging upper storeys weren't aesthetic flourishes: they kept the sun off the meat below. Look closely at a few of the shopfronts and you can still see the wide sills the meat sat on and the hooks above them.

At its peak the street held dozens of butchers' shops. It was loud, it was crowded, and, let's be honest, it will have smelled absolutely dreadful. Six centuries later the butchers are gone, the smell has vastly improved, and the accidental architecture they left behind has become one of the most photographed streets in Europe.

The Shambles wasn't built to be beautiful. It was built to sell meat and keep the sun off it. The beauty is six hundred years of accident, which is somehow better.

The saint at number 35

Halfway down, easy to miss between the shopfronts, there's a doorway that leads to a small, quiet shrine. It commemorates Margaret Clitherow, a butcher's wife who lived on this street in the 1500s and was executed for sheltering Catholic priests during the Reformation. She was canonised in 1970. Whatever your beliefs, stepping out of the shopping crowds into that small still room, on the very street where she lived and worked, is one of the most quietly affecting things you can do in York. The Shambles holds both things at once, the fudge shops and the sainthood, and doesn't see any contradiction.

Yes, the wizard thing

We might as well address it: the Shambles is widely claimed as an inspiration for a certain famous fictional wizarding shopping street, and several shops on it have leaned into the association with enthusiasm. Purists grumble. We take the generous view: people cross the world to walk down a medieval street in Yorkshire because it looks like magic, and they're not wrong, they've just got the direction of inspiration backwards. The Shambles doesn't look like the films. The films look like the Shambles. First one wins.

Shambles, properly

How to fall in love with it again

If the crowds have soured it for you, try this. Set an alarm for stupidly early on a Sunday. Walk in as the sun's coming up, when the shutters are down and the street is empty and slightly misty and entirely yours. Stand in the middle. Look up at the gap of sky. Somewhere a gull will be making a racket, because this is still Yorkshire, but otherwise it's just you and six hundred years of leaning timber.

That's the street the whole world queues to see. And it's a seven-minute walk from your front door, give or take. Some cities have a river view or a skyline. We have a crooked little butchers' street that never stopped casting its spell. We'd call that a fair trade, even with the city that took our name.