York Castle Museum

Step onto Kirkgate, a recreated Victorian street where shop windows, period goods and cobbled lanes bring everyday life in 19th-century York back into view. Each shop is based on a real business that operated in the city between 1870 and 1901, from a traditional pharmacy to a toy shop and a scientific instrument dealer. York Castle Museum opened in 1938 in former prison buildings on the site of York Castle. Its collections explore how people lived across the centuries, through historic clothing, domestic interiors, wartime objects and displays about the swinging sixties. Visitors can also enter the old prison cells and discover stories of crime and punishment, including the infamous highwayman Dick Turpin.