York, drawn from its own streets.

York on paper

Two rivers meet in the middle of the frame. The Ouse runs south-east through the city, wide and slow, and the Foss joins it from the north-east, narrow and much straighter after centuries of managing. Between and around them sits the medieval core: the tightest street pattern the print draws anywhere in England, short streets at every angle, snickelways barely long enough to register, opening suddenly into the market and the minster's precinct where the drawing goes quiet.

Outside that core the change is abrupt. Georgian and Victorian streets run in long straight lines out along the old roads — Bootham, Gillygate, Fulford Road, Bishopthorpe Road — with terraces combed off them, and the contrast between the ordered rows and the knot they surround is the point of a York print. The railway arrives from the south-west and curves around the western edge of the centre in a broad arc with the station inside it, which on paper is the largest single piece of engineering in the frame.

The green is concentrated rather than scattered: the Museum Gardens by the river, the Dean's Park and the strays at the edges, each reading as a pale block against dense streets. At four kilometres every lane in the centre is legible at A3, which is unusual — most cities need A2 before the small streets separate. Widen to eight and you pick up the racecourse, the university lake and the ring road; widen further and York becomes a small mark in the Vale of York, which is a different and quieter print.