About Us

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About Us

Make It York is a private limited company, limited by shares, with circa 40 employees and an independent Board of Directors. Our sole Shareholder is City of York Council.

In a typical year our turnover is around £4.8 million, generated commercially from a range of revenue sources and, other than any dividends payable to the shareholder, any surplus is invested back into the city.

Sarah Loftus, Managing Director at Make It York, has outlined her proposed three-year business plan for the destination management organisation. This plan was approved by councillors at a Shareholder Committee Meeting on the 28th March 2022.

As a company, we have four key areas of focus:

Culture

Ensuring that culture is relevant and accessible to everybody in York by placing culture at the heart of our activities, from major capital developments to residents’ wellbeing – and working to ensure cultural entitlement for every child.

Our Culture Strategy has the ambition to transform York – and by 2025 we believe York will be known as a city where outstanding, renowned heritage comes together with a cutting-edge and contemporary approach to creativity – reflecting the city’s rich history and its status as the UK’s first UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts.

Make It York supports permanent and temporary markets, festivals, and delivers, attracts and facilitates world-class cultural and creative events that expand and positively enhance perceptions of York.

This includes, as examples, York’s status as a host city for the Rugby League World Cup and the expansion of our renowned York Ice Trail to become one of the UK’s largest outdoor events.

Events

Markets

The city has a very special independent retail and hospitality sector and Make It York is responsible for city centre management and the development of key areas of high public footfall, such as Shambles Market, which offers significant additional opportunities for development and expansion.

Our Christmas Market is regularly cited as one of the best in the UK and we continue to develop and innovate a calendar of events for the city to ensure that we offer an inclusive and accessible range of events that inspire and excite diverse audiences all year round.

Leading on the city’s tourism strategy (as part of York’s wider economic strategy) under our Visit York brand, marketing York as a must-see world-class destination to the leisure and business visitor and ensuring investment to develop the quality of tourism in York.

Our visitor economy activity covers all aspects of tourism marketing and resident engagement, including market intelligence, as well as providing business support through our membership programme.

We operate the York Pass, York’s city-sightseeing card and we run the city’s Visitor Information Centre.