Here is a thought to carry with you next time you're stood in Dean's Park looking up: the people who started building York Minster knew they would never see it finished. Not them, not their children, not their grandchildren. Work began around 1220 and the building was consecrated as complete in 1472. That's roughly 250 years. Ten generations of masons, glaziers and carpenters, most of whom spent whole careers on a building they'd only ever know as a construction site.

And the result of all that patience is the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe, sitting in the middle of a small Yorkshire city, visible from every approach road, casually photobombing every skyline picture anyone has ever taken here.

Built on top of everything that came before

The Minster doesn't just dominate York's skyline; it sits directly on top of York's history. Go down into the undercroft and you can see the foundations of the Roman fortress headquarters where, in 306 AD, Constantine was proclaimed emperor. The Normans built a cathedral on the same spot. The Gothic Minster was built up, over and around that Norman one, which was demolished in stages as its replacement grew. The building you see today is the top layer of nearly two thousand years of people deciding that this exact patch of ground was the most important place in the north.

A window the size of a tennis court

The Minster's Great East Window is the largest single expanse of medieval stained glass in Britain, roughly the size of a tennis court. It was made by one man's workshop: a master glazier from Coventry called John Thornton, who signed the contract in 1405 and finished in 1408. Three years, for a wall of glass telling the whole story of the world from Genesis to Revelation. He earned a bonus for finishing on time, which may make him the last contractor in history to do so.

Then there are the Five Sisters, five tall lancets of grey-green grisaille glass from the 1250s, which survived the Reformation, the Civil War and both World Wars. The glass was removed and buried for safekeeping during the First World War, then releaded and rededicated in the 1920s as a memorial to women of the British Empire who died in the war. A window older than Parliament, doing memorial duty for the modern age.

Ten generations of masons spent whole careers on a building they would only ever know as a construction site. The Minster is what patience looks like when it's given 250 years and decent stone.

Disasters, survived

The Minster's history is not serene. The central tower collapsed in 1407 and had to be rebuilt with mighty reinforced foundations. In the 1960s engineers discovered the central tower was at risk of collapsing again, and a heroic underpinning project filled the foundations with concrete and steel. And in 1984, a fire tore through the South Transept roof, an event every York resident of a certain age can tell you about in vivid detail, along with where they were standing when they saw the smoke.

The response to the fire is one of our favourite York stories. The roof was rebuilt with new carved bosses, and six of the designs came from a children's competition run by the BBC's Blue Peter. Somewhere above the South Transept, alongside centuries-old craftsmanship, there are roof carvings designed by schoolchildren in the 1980s, including one of astronauts on the moon. The building simply absorbed it, the way it has absorbed everything else for 800 years.

Minster numbers

Still being built

Here's the part most visitors miss. The Minster is never actually finished. It has its own stoneyard, where masons and carvers work with hammer and chisel on magnesian limestone, cutting replacement blocks for weathered stonework exactly as their medieval predecessors did. Look closely at the outside of the building and you'll spot crisp, pale new stone sitting beside centuries-old blocks, and modern grotesques with distinctly modern faces up among the medieval ones. The craft never stopped. It just kept going, quietly, for eight hundred years.

We find that genuinely moving, and very York. The city that never rushed anything, keeping a team of people employed forever on a building that will never be done, because some things are worth doing properly and then worth maintaining properly, indefinitely.

New York put up the Empire State Building in 410 days, and fair play, it's a wonderful thing. But our big building took 250 years, employs stone carvers to this day, and has its own tiny police force. (Really. The York Minster Police. Look them up.) We lent them the name; we kept the patience.