Hold on to your Hats! It's a Viking Time Machine!

This is a post I made on a site called Epinions back in 2001 when my visit to the Jorvik Centre in York was fresh in my mind and I decided to right an online review of it.......


Way back when Eric Bloodaxe was king, ten centuries ago, the city of York in England was known as Jorvik and Vikings held sway. A lot of time passed. And then…

Twenty years ago, beneath the streets of modern York, in the trendy Coppergate shopping district, archaeologists discovered the remains of the Viking city, preserved in layers of glutinous river mud. Through years of painstaking research they were able to recreate what this place must once have looked like and to gather information on the daily lives of Jorvik’s citizens.

What did the Vikings look like? What did they eat and what did they wear? And what was a walk through the streets of ancient Jorvik like anyway? The result of all this excavation is the Jorvik Viking Centre, one of the most famous and touted tourist attractions in York, and located on the actual excavation site. Originally opened to the public in 1984, the Jorvik Centre recently underwent a face-lift worth five million British pounds.

The new improved JORVIK re-opened in April of this year. (2001)

This May, my mother and I travelled to York, as part of a back-packing trip to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. We were quite delighted with York, which is a very pedestrian-friendly city, and we had just finished exploring the very interesting York Museum in the Museum Gardens, which is home to a large variety of both Roman and Viking artifacts found nearby. We decided to seek out more Viking information and decided to try the Jorvik Centre, another museum which was promoted heavily in both brochures and guidebooks.

The next morning we arrived early in the Coppergate district, expecting to have to join a large queue of people waiting to get in as we’d been warned. But luck was with us , or else the secret is to go early on a week-day morning. We walked in just in time to buy a ticket and join the next load of tourists waiting to board the “time-cars”.

The Premise:

The people of Jorvik lived a long time ago, in the 10th century, right? You can’t just expect to walk into a museum and see a Viking town as it was. No, first you have to go back through time. Therefore you have to find a time-machine. They have one of sorts at the Jorvik Centre.

After buying your ticket, you descend a staircase until you find a waiting-room with small movie-screens on all the walls. The screens show you information about the excavations on this site until a Jorvik employee appears and announces it is time to board the “time-machine”. I believe she asked if anyone experienced any back pain. Hmmm… We were led into a darkened room filled with narrow metal benches with no backs and we sat down. On the movie screen at the front a young man and woman appeared dressed in modern clothes. They are talking about time-travel…but oh no, something is wrong!

Suddenly our metal benches give a lurch and klaxons and bells are sounding! A red light flashes on the wall! We are going back in time very fast! The modern couple on the screen look a little startled and bemused as every time our benches lurch back and forth, there is a rumble and ripple on the screen and their clothes change.

As we time-travel, the folks change their fashion sense. In quick succession they are hippies, beatniks, flappers, decked out in Tudor lace, bowing to each other in medieval garb, until finally the date on the screen takes us to Viking times.

There is a little musical soundtrack to this production. It struck me as amusing, if rather elaborate, but if you were feeling cynical the day you visited Jorvik, you might call it all a bit silly.

Now That We've All Travelled Back in Time....

The lights come up in the time-machine and we are instructed to go down a short blue-lit passage-way. At the other end of this, the “time-cars” are waiting. Guide-book writer Rick Steve, in his Guidebook to Great Britain and Ireland 1999 , says that the Jorvik Viking Centre reminds him of the Pirates of the Caribbean of Disneyland fame, “more of a ride than a museum.” Well, I see what he means now.

The time-cars are shiny and new-looking and whisk four tourists along, turning this way and that on an overhead track. Headphones fold out at the top of your seat offering historical commentary in a number of languages, also including the choice of a special commentary meant for children. The seats are very comfortable. I mention these cars in so much detail because they are part of why I was reluctant to recommend the Jorvik “Experience”. It doesn’t have so much to do with the exhibit itself which I will describe momentarily, but with the way the tourist is propelled through the midst of it. It takes less than fifteen minutes to travel up and down the streets of Jorvik.

Whoosh!

We see Viking children playing a board-game by the side of the street. But just as we peer forward to take a better look—whoosh!

The car changes directions, directing our attention to something on the other side. Whoosh!

Ah, there are some Viking sailors unloading exotic cargo from far lands. What exactly is it?

But—whoosh! we are now looking at somebody working in a blacksmith’s shop. If I lean forward to get a better look at something I might also miss part of the interesting commentary, but if I lean back in my seat to listen properly I’ll miss some of the fabulous detail in this recreation.

Those time cars need to slooooow down.

The Streets of Ancient Jorvik: What I loved most about this museum was the knowledge that the streets I was travelling down and the houses I looked upon once actually existed on this very spot. The people who put this centre together followed the original archaeologists’ “map” of where these streets stood a thousand years ago.

Even better, the mannequins (some animatronic, others not) have been built with forensic detail. In other words, some of the faces in the streets of this Jorvik were modeled on the faces of Vikings who actually lived here and left their mortal remains.

The streets consist of muddy pathways, lined with homes of straw and wood. You can look into a merchant’s shop and see what was selling in the Coppergate district even back then. Ten centuries later and folks are still shopping here!

People are going about their everyday jobs. They are buying, selling, eating, and building. Chickens are clucking, stray dogs play in the street, and you can smell Viking dinners cooking.

The time-car even takes you right into a family home (dark, smoky and dirty-looking). There is an emphasis on the realities of everyday life back then, even going so far as to show a Viking toilet in use (discreetly screened, however the grunting was not very discreet).

This last item brings me to the subject of the “new and improved” Jorvik. Apparently, some of the improvements at modern Jorvik included changing the “environmental conditions” of the exhibit. This meant introducing “cool autumn breezes” and things like “blasts of heat” from the blacksmith’s forge .

But, if you have visited the Viking Centre before the recent face-lift you will probably realize the absence of certain other environmental “conditions’. Apparently, some of the Viking streets were smelling a little too “real” for some tourists’ sensitive noses, and the offending smells have been replaced. Hurray, the autumn breezes have replaced the smell of..well, pooh, I guess. I didn’t see any sewage facilities on my tour of these streets. Sometimes it pays to be less than realistic.

As the time car approaches the last house on the tour, you see the house spookily fade away (it’s a very good hologram) and in its place you see the blackened timbers of an actual Viking house that was partially destroyed by fire. It’s a spooky feeling.

After the Ride:

This is where you leave the time-cars behind, and proceed on foot to see the rest of the museum. It’s not very big really, but it spreads its artifacts out in a gallery that winds around corners.

We meet a man dressed in Norse clothing who is helping a group of school-children strike their very own Viking coins with a hefty mallet. We decide that Viking coins would make interesting (and light) souvenirs.

“Would you like me to do that for you, flower?’, he asks my mom.

“Oh, yes please!”, she says.

WHAM! went the hammer.

“Can I do that for you, petal?” I am asked.

Today, “Petal” decides to strike her own coin. My, but those Viking hammers are heavy.

The artifact gallery holds an assortment of items found on site and used in daily life, but I wish there had been more here. I felt a little disappointed.

There were carpentry tools, playing die, hair combs, clothing pins, and harness buckles. But there were no examples of Viking weapons or armour. A very impressive helmet found here can be seen, however, in the display in the Museum Gardens.

Some items here are placed in hologram displays so that you could see how they were used. As is usual for museums, there was a gift shop to wade through before reaching the outside street again, but it contained some very dismal and tacky souvenirs so I won’t discuss them here.

Other Information:

The Jorvik Viking Centre is open seven days a week, from nine in the morning until five-thirty in the evening.

It is fairly expensive to get in, although I found many British tourist attractions to be either similarly expensive or entirely free. The admission for one adult is nearly seven British pounds, which is about seventeen dollars Canadian. Ouch. There is a slight discount for students and seniors, and a child’s admission is five pounds.

The people at the Jorvik Centre said it would take about an hour to go through, maybe a little less. I think it took about 45 minutes.

Finding the Jorvik centre is quite easy as York’s downtown area is heavily sign-posted to help tourists. It is about a fifteen minute walk from York’s train station.

Final Thoughts:

I honestly wrestled with how to rate this Epinion. Should I recommend Jorvik to others or not? In the end I decided not to because although this is a somewhat unique tourist attraction and I enjoyed my visit overall, there are better and less expensive places to do it in York.

Check out the York Museum, for instance. You can spend all the time you like here. Maybe I’m just a fan of those dry and stuffy museums that don’t take you for a “ride”.