The lockdown view from York: ‘To be OK, we need to open on 3 December’

Lockdown will end on 2 December – but there will still be strict regional restrictions. We look at how tourist businesses in York – which recorded the UK’s first Covid-19 cases – are adapting to the new normal

Step back in time, way back, to a different world and a different life … about mid-January 2020. In York, the city’s tourism chiefs were developing a strategy for it to become a £1bn industry by 2025, not bad for a city of around 200,000. But on 29 January two guests at the Staycity Hotel just outside the city walls became the first Covid-19 infection cases in the UK.

I remember it well: I was with friends in the Phoenix pub not 200m away and we were joking about The Daily Mail’s report, Coronavirus panic hits York. The closest to panic came when last orders were called. Worldwide the death toll was barely 170, about the same number that die every hour on the planet’s roads.