More than 8 million people visit York each year, packing cheek-by-jowl into its narrow snickelways and labyrinthine lanes. Yet what was until recently a key attraction of the Viking city is now a physical distancing nightmare: how can you keep two metres away from everybody else when one of the top tourist attractions is a street called the Shambles that is scarcely wide enough to navigate on a go-kart?

One idea is the introduction of a one-way system for pedestrians, which would stop tourists rubbing up against each other in streets that in the 14th century allowed the Black Death to spread so rapidly that half the population was wiped out one summer.

The measure is part of a “confidence charter” proposed by the York Retail Forum to give visitors peace of mind when they return after the lockdown is lifted.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A sign in a Shambles shop window. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/Rex/Shutterstock

“Obviously we have lots of narrow streets and you can’t keep the necessary distance away from other people if you have people going in both directions,” said Phil Pinder, who chairs the forum. He runs the Potions Cauldron, an exotic drinks emporium on the Shambles, which is said to have been an inspiration for the fictional Diagon Alley, the magical merchant market from Harry Potter.

“Our shop is 2.5 metres by five metres, and so you can already see social distancing is hard. But outside my shop the width of the street is only about three metres,” said Pinder.

“We had a meeting at the retail forum last week and we agreed that narrow streets have got to be one-way. When everyone is walking in different directions it’s difficult to get from one end to the other, so we are looking to the council to put up cones, maybe even metal barriers, and signs to show people clearly where they should walk.”

Other ideas include installing on-street hand sanitiser dispensers and a promotion of what Pinder calls the “Yorkshire spirit” – a can-do attitude that prides pragmatism above personal liberty. This may encourage visitors to leave their selfies for another time.

“People are always stopping outside our shop to take a selfie but it might be that we will have to ask them not to for a while, to keep everybody moving,” said Pinder.

He is already considering closing his shop to browsers, serving them instead through what is known locally as a “Yorkshire window” – a horizontal sliding sash hatch, seen only in the oldest listed buildings in the county.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A queue at the window of a bakery in Little Shambles. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/Rex/Shutterstock

Rachael Maskell, the MP for York Central, welcomed the one-way idea. “It does make sense in that York is full of narrow little snickets, so I can see why you can’t have people go two ways down them. You can’t socially distance on the Shambles or when walking on the city walls. I think it’s a sensible idea but it might be a challenge to control it,” she said.

She believes York is at an “economic crossroads” and that the pause in business offers an opportunity to rethink an economy that works more for the 8.4 million annual visitors than many of its 200,000 inhabitants.

“The whole economy of the city is going to have to be reset and it’s an opportunity to do that because there has been a high level of under-employment and low productivity spread across the retail, hospitality and tourist sectors and we have a deficit of good-quality, skilled jobs in the city,” she said.

“We are at an economic crossroads and we can’t just say ‘lockdown’s over, here you go’. We really do need proper investment in the right places in the economy, otherwise it will just fall over.”