There's a moment every York local knows by heart. You're abroad, someone asks where you're from, you say “York”, and their eyes go wide. “New York?!” No, you explain, for the hundredth time. The old one. The original one. And then, if you're feeling generous, you tell them the best bit: the big one is named after us.

It's true, and it's a better story than most people realise. To tell it properly, you have to start about sixteen centuries before Manhattan got involved.

First, there was Eboracum

In 71 AD, the Ninth Legion of the Roman army marched north and set up a fortress on the spit of land where the River Foss meets the River Ouse. They called it Eboracum. It was meant to be a military outpost; it became one of the most important cities in Roman Britain.

How important? Emperors didn't just visit; they lived and died here. Septimius Severus ran the entire Roman Empire from York for three years. And in 306 AD, when the emperor Constantius died in the city, his son was proclaimed emperor by the troops right here. That son was Constantine the Great, the man who would go on to legalise Christianity and found Constantinople. There's a statue of him lounging outside the Minster today, looking appropriately pleased with himself.

Then the Vikings gave us the name

Fast-forward to 866 AD. The Great Heathen Army takes the city, and Eboracum, by then the Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic, becomes Jórvík, the capital of the Viking north. For nearly a century it's one of the great trading hubs of Europe, with merchants, craftsmen and ships from across the known world.

Say “Jórvík” quickly. Now say it quickly for two hundred years. Somewhere in all that mumbling, the name wore smooth like a cobble, and out came “York”. Short, sturdy, impossible to improve. The kind of name that travels well, as it was about to prove.

New York isn't named after a place at all, really. It's named after a title, and the title is named after us.

1664: the name emigrates

Across the Atlantic, at the mouth of the Hudson River, the Dutch had a colony called New Amsterdam. In 1664, an English fleet sailed into the harbour and took it without a shot being fired. Charles II handed the territory to his younger brother James, whose grandest title was Duke of York.

The colony was promptly renamed in the Duke's honour. Not after him personally, note: after his title. And the title of Duke of York has meant one thing since the 14th century: this city. Our city. The one with the walls and the Minster and the swans with attitude.

So the chain of naming runs, unbroken: Eboracum → Jórvík → York → Duke of York → New York. A walled market city in Yorkshire, population around 200,000 today, is the reason eight million New Yorkers write the word “York” on their post.

Things York did before New York existed

Why we love this story

Not because it makes York “better” than New York; that's not the game, and anyway, they've done marvellous things with the name. We love it because it's the perfect York story in miniature: a small, unhurried city that has quietly shaped the world for two thousand years and never felt the need to shout about it.

New York got the skyscrapers. We kept the walls, the snickelways, the bells on a Sunday morning, and the pleasure of watching a tourist realise, mid-conversation, eyes widening, that they're standing in the original.

So if you've arrived at this website expecting Manhattan: welcome. Genuinely. Stay a while, have a look around. We named the place, after all. The least we can do is show you where the name grew up.