Micklegate

Here is Micklegate Post Office just the place to buy postcards to mail home if visiting York.  One step to browse the postcards on the right, enter to buy them and the stamps and then pop them in the Royal Mail box outside.  There is a handily placed bench outside the Micklegate Fisheries to eat fish and chips in the sunshine.

This block of buildings is, as you have now guessed, is on Micklegate (a name from the Norse, mykla gata, meaning Great Street).  The timbered black and white building is probably 16th Century and was restored in 1967 when it was estimated it was only ten years away from collapse. The lower portion is divided into shops, and has been throughout the centuries,  in past ages they were butchers shops and it is thought that is one of the reasons the building survived.  I am not sure of the dates of the other two buildings but would guess the one in the middle might be 17th Century and possibly the post office building is 18th Century. I believe there has been a post office here since 1842 (two years after the world's first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, was issued).

One way to walk along Micklegate is to enter through
 

Micklegate Bar, one of the entrances to the walled city of York since Medieval times.  Traditionally when the reigning monarch approaches the gate they have to ask the permission of the Lord Mayor to enter the city.  Here is the present Queen in 2012 outside the gate when she had come to give out the Maundy Money at York Minster on the Thursday before Easter Good Friday.

From Friends of York Walls page

An entry to ABC Wednesday, a journey through the alphabet, this week sojourning at M here