In English city, cleaning windows becomes a tourist draw

YORK, ENGLAND—Helen Brower is a window cleaner and people pay five pounds ($7.25) an hour to watch her work.

Brower is one of a half dozen glaziers hired to clean and restore the world’s largest collection of medieval stained-glass windows. They festoon York Minster, one of Europe’s largest cathedrals and they need to be cleaned every 125 years....

On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, tours — with a maximum of 10 people — are conducted into the bowels of the cathedral to watch glaziers work on the medieval window panes. While down there visitors can also see remains of the Roman fortress that once stood on this site before the cathedral was built between 1220 and 1472. Yes, it took 252 years.

Another sign of York’s Roman heritage is the high stone wall surrounding the city’s ancient core. Much of it was built by the Romans back in 71 AD, about the same time they were building the colosseum in Rome....