From its name, you’d not likely guess how much there is to see in the York Museum Gardens, one of the city’s beauties. The name is, at best shorthand.
Within its walls are a natural history museum, a pioneer observatory, a botanic garden, pieces of a Roman fort and walls, the ruins of the medieval St Mary’s Abbey, part of the city’s ancient walls and the remains of St Leonard’s hospital and chapel.
Also to be found, on a warm day, are crowds of residents and visitors using the grounds as a convenient way to cross part of the city.
The whole ten acres of St Mary’s came into royal hands when Henry VIII seized all church properties in the 1530s; almost 300 years later, the royal family gave the grounds to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society as a site for their new museum, with a requirement that they also operate a botanical garden.
There was originally a small menagerie also, but according to a history published to celebrate the Gardens’ 150th anniversary, it “was destroyed when a bear escaped from it and had brief control of the area.” The Society turned the Gardens over to the city in 1960; they’re managed by the York Museums Trust as a public park.
While there are no longer bears or monkeys, the garden is home to many species of birds, and is also one of the few homes of several species of endangered insects that have been given a home there.
