A Snapshot of York Industry Through Time
York, because of its cloth trade and the ancillary industries associated with it in the 14th century, was described as ‘the foremost industrial town in the North of England.’ This prosperity was short-lived though, and the trade in cloth declined to such a degree that, as we have seen, a visitor to the city in the seventeenth century, Thomas Fuller, remarked: ‘the foreign trade is like their river...low and flat.’. The railway and confectionery industries were soon to change York’s industrial...