Emeritus Professor G. R. Batho a personal perspective on the city of the prince bishops. We all have highly personal impressions of the towns and cities with which we are familiar. Few readers of The Historian are likely to emulate the good lady who hearing that I was leaving the train at Durham remarked that she always knew when we arrived at Durham because of the neon sign above the cinema. She apparently had discounted the Cathedral and the Castle. The area of the ‘rock’, as it is known locally, which contains these two architectural phenomena was declared a World Heritage site in 1987.