Directions to CityScreen Picture House

Radisson Hotel York is a modernist ten-storey hotel that opened on 1 January 1969. The site of the hotel was previously York’s port, which by the 1960s was in steep decline. Its first name was the Viking Hotel, a nod (of course) to the city’s Viking heritage. The Viking was actually the first hotel built in York for ninety years, and marked a significant step change in the city’s attitude towards tourism. The city had for centuries held an attraction for wealthy visitors, who stayed in the city’s range of small hotels and inns, but this new hotel with its modern form was clearly an attempt to improve York’s offer to an expanding middle class tourist market. The hotel is hated by many for the way it looks—people say that it spoils the riverside view, that it is not sympathetic to York’s history—but yet the hotel is responsible for bringing hundreds of thousands of tourists into the city every year to enjoy the city. This podcast argues that although its modernist style does not fit in the heritage version of York enjoyed and expected by tourists, its difference is an interruption which encourages us to ‘deconstruct’ the tourist version of the city. It is also suggested that the hotel’s distinctive aesthetic style is misleading in that it is firmly embedded, and indeed a prominent emblem of York’s increasing economic reliance upon tourism and the heritage industry. 

Listen to the podcast below to learn more!