WITH the right guide, arriving in York is rather like taking a lesson in British history over two millennia. On a walk from the railway station Sir Ron Cooke, a local grandee, points out ancient Roman fortifications, medieval city walls, palatial Tudor houses and the old railway station, built just ten years after Stephenson rode on his Rocket. The tour ends with a 1960s university building, built on the site of one of Henry VIII’s wine cellars.

Yet in their brochures for international investors, published in Chinese as well as English, the city’s authorities choose not to picture any of these things. Instead, they picked the town’s most startlingly modern development: York University’s new Heslington East campus. Its bright buildings, all steel, glass and wood panelling, stand above a lake on greenfield land on the city’s south-eastern fringe—more like Texas than England.

The Heslington campus is just one part of York’s transformation. Twenty years ago the city, as Sir Ron puts it, was “poor, proud and pretty”. Its local economy was still dominated by Victorian industries: railways (the city had a large carriage works) and chocolate (the Rowntree factory—now owned by Nestlé—is in York). Both were in relative decline. The carriage works closed in 1996; smaller rail companies followed over the next decade. Terry’s, the other chocolate firm manufacturing in York, closed its factory and exported production overseas in 2005.

Yet whereas other northern manufacturing towns have struggled with industrial decline, York is thriving. Its employment rate is 78%, compared with 71% nationally. Growth has come in the right sort of jobs, too: wages have climbed faster than the national average (which is buoyed up by London) over the past decade. It is, as Danny Dorling, a demographer at the University of Sheffield, puts it, a chunk of the affluent south east dropped in Yorkshire.

Several pillars support York’s economic success. Most important is its sheer attractiveness. Some 7m visitors come to the city (population 200,000) each year. Its heritage creates tourism jobs, but it also attracts footloose, well-educated workers. It helps that York is easy to get to. George Hudson, a Victorian railway promoter, got his wish to “make all t’railways come to York”: today 35 trains run daily to London, getting there in under two hours—the fastest link any northern city has with the capital.

But York is no commuter town, as other Roman cities such as Chester and Winchester have become. It supports several industries of its own. Nestlé still has its manufacturing plant there, but it has also recently added more research and development jobs too. Aviva, a big insurer, has an office. Hiscox, another insurer, intends to open a new office next year. Smaller firms also abound, such as Revolution Software, the developer of the Broken Sword series of adventure video games.

The vitality is helped along by two universities, York and York St John. These have both expanded rapidly in recent years: they now have some 22,000 students between them. Students bring money and highly-paid academics. Many stay in the city after graduating—some 41% of the population has degree-level qualifications, against just 29% in Yorkshire and the Humber. The universities also incubate new businesses. York’s Heslington campus has cheap office space for start-ups: new firms pay no rent for three months. That is helping to create a growing cluster of tech firms.

Perhaps the most unusual force for change in York is the city’s new council leadership, which is embracing growth in a way that few in similarly attractive bits of Britain dare. Historically, the city council has been fiercely hostile to new building, says Andrew Lindsay, a lawyer. He once saw a local councillor claim that “York doesn’t need more jobs.”

This changed in 2011, when the Liberal Democrat administration was replaced by a new Labour one, which is more open to new business. James Alexander, the city’s council leader, wants to build around 1,100 new houses a year over the next decade—a rate of construction comparable to fast-growing Milton Keynes. These will be built on green-belt land if needs be. The council has already approved a big extension to an out-of-town shopping centre, Monks Cross. Katie Stewart, an American immigrant who serves as the council’s economic development officer, sees a whole new business district rising up on land near the railway station.

The houses of York

If development is done badly it could dent the city’s beauty—and so weaken its appeal to businesses. Charles Cecil, one of the founders of Revolution Games, is already furious at the decision to allow Monks Cross. Homeowners are unlikely to like thousands of new houses shooting up.

Yet the greater risk is not that growth will destroy the city but that the city squanders its chance for growth. York has everything that a city needs to succeed in Britain: good schools, nice housing and a cluster of educated, middle-class professionals. It is close enough to London for business to thrive, without being so close as to be swallowed up by it. More so than similarly pretty places like Oxford and Cambridge, York wants to be bigger and more important, not a chocolate-box city with no chocolate factories. Despite its appearances, the city has never been a museum. It sits on the ruins of the past, be they Roman brick or Brutalist concrete.