York Castle Museum is a museum located in York, North Yorkshire, England, on the site of York Castle, originally built by William the Conqueror in 1068. The museum itself was founded by Dr John L Kirk in 1938, and is housed in prison buildings which were built on the site of the castle in the 18th century, the Debtors Prison (built in 1701-05 using stone from the ruins of the castle) and the Female Prison (built 1780-1785).
The museum's displays include recreated period rooms such as a Victorian parlour and a 17th century dining room. There are displays of everyday life including an exhibition about rites of passage and an exhibition all about washing and cleaning. There is also a Hearth Gallery with recreated fireplaces and kitchens. A display about life in the prison has been opened in the cells of the old Debtors Prison. There is also a recreation of a Victorian street (Kirkgate, named after Dr. Kirk). What was once an Edwardian street (Half Moon Court) is now an exhibit on the 1960s. The museum also has a Barn Gallery, a Children's Gallery and military and costume displays. The former Condemned Cell, possibly once occupied by Dick Turpin, can also be visited. Studio areas feature programmed activities where visitors can come into close contact with items from the museum's large and nationally designated collections.
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“New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men’s failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for work, a mortal’s natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle?”
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863)
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)