A New Icon

I see my home, York, has won another Best City In Britain award. We get a lot of these accolades. Never the Best City To Live In, though. Just the Best City To Visit; and then escape from before you start getting depressed by the lack of, well, anything to do. My joy this time was also tempered by the fact that the award was voted by Daily Telegraph readers. To translate for non-Brits: you've heard of the phrase "just to the right of Genghis Khan"? Here we also say, "just to the right of the Daily Telegraph." Our supporters are elderly colonels who probably like York because it's "not full of all those black chappies."

Anyway, I was mildly interested by the photo accompanying the 'story' in the local free rag. It featured the Minster, of course. You still cannot have a general story about York without showing the Minster. There are laws. The cathedral was relegated to the background, however. Pride of place was given to the York Eye. A city with a history stretching back to the Romans is now epitomised by a damn great ferris wheel.

The York Eye, admittedly, is impressive. Erected a few years ago beside the National Railway Museum, it has been extremely popular with tourists. I gather that it gives remarkable views over what is still a low, flat city. It is also lit up by an ethereal light when darkness descends. You can see part of it over the Bar Walls from my office window. It is a nice spectacle to gaze upon as I work late into the evening and wonder what's happened to my life. Still, the York Eye is only a damn great ferris wheel. Moreover, it looks like all the other damn great ferris wheel which have sprung up across Britain recently; many of which, notably London's, are even damn greater.

What makes a building a symbol of a place? So much so that this one structure can always be used as a shorthand image of the whole city? Size, fame and bombast are sometimes seen as the only criteria. But I think the most important quality is originality. This building has to mean that place because nothing like it is found anywhere else. The Golden Gate doesn't work because, frankly, it's just a damn great suspension bridge. But the Guggenheim has to mean Bilbao, the Statue of Liberty New York and the Reichstag – at least since Norman Foster's deranged dome was added – Berlin.

So the Eye doesn't work as an icon of York. Nor did the Minster, however. Except for connoisseurs, it is indistinguishable from any other gothic cathedral. Or most cathedrals of any age, really – I only know it's gothic because enough books have told me so. It's just the biggest thing we have got. York has never been about size, however. If it was, it would have bothered growing into an actual city, rather than just a town which got a leg-up in status because it has a cathedral. What it does specialise in is quirkiness. There are plenty of structures here possessed by no other city, mainly because they can't imagine why they would want them. Any one would make a fine new symbol of York. As a starter, also giving a neat tie-in to my web site, I nominate A House Called House, the Rock Church or the Hand of Monkgate. And if they are less striking than a ferris wheel, if York becomes less popular and attracts a few less Daily Telegraph readers…. well, we'll just have to cope.