York 50 metres from the queue: crooked pews, a Cold War bunker

Hidden York lies in the yards and passages behind the main streets: a church with box pews behind a gate on Goodramgate, a convent opened in secret in 1686, a medieval house hidden inside an office block until the eighties. Only the Cold War bunker takes you out of the centre.

Holy Trinity Goodramgate

A small church in a yard behind a gate on Goodramgate. Inside are box pews from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — family enclosures with little doors — and a floor that has sagged. It is cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, opened by volunteers, and free to enter.

The Cold War bunker

An underground command post from 1961, from which the Royal Observer Corps was to track nuclear bursts and fallout over Yorkshire. It worked until 1991 and is now run by English Heritage: guided tours only, an hour long, with a ten-minute film.

The Bar Convent

A convent opened in secret in 1686, when being Catholic was illegal, and by its own account the oldest in Britain where sisters still live. The eighteenth-century chapel is hidden in the middle of the building under a slate roof, with eight exits through which the congregation could vanish in a raid. From outside it looks like an ordinary town house, which was the point. The exhibition charges; the café is free to walk into.

Four more

• The snickelways — a word coined in 1983 by Mark W. Jones from three local terms for a passage: snicket, ginnel and alleyway. The longest is Coffee Yard, about sixty-seven metres, off Stonegate, and it leads to Barley Hall.
• The Minster undercroft — a museum in the space dug out between 1967 and 1972 while the central tower, in danger of collapse, was underpinned: remains of the Roman fortress, an Anglo-Saxon cemetery and the Norman foundations. Entry is on the Minster ticket, €23.
• Barley Hall — a medieval house on Coffee Yard, hidden behind the front of an office block until the eighties and found only when it was due for demolition. It has been returned to its fifteenth-century state.
• Rowntree Park — a park given to the city in 1921 by the Rowntree chocolate works, as a memorial to workers killed in the First World War.

Day tripsAnd once you leave the city, Yorkshire begins immediately:Day trips from York →

One hack

Buy the bunker ticket online: it is fifteen per cent cheaper than on the door, and a tour can be booked as little as ten minutes before it starts, from your phone while you are still in town. The bunker opens only Friday to Sunday, late March to late October, so the York day is built around it rather than the other way round.