In 2001, the centre was refurbished and enlarged at a cost of £5 million, and a further investment of £1 million followed in February 2010. Since its formation, the Centre has had close to 20 million visitors. The Jorvik Viking Centre, which was designed by John Sunderland, opened in April 1984. The trust recreated the excavated part of Jorvik on the site, peopled with figures, sounds and smells, as well as pigsties, fish market and latrines, with a view to bringing the Viking city fully to life using innovative interpretative methods. In all, over 40,000 objects were recovered.
Unusually, wood, leather, textiles, and plant and animal remains from the period around 900 AD, were also discovered to be preserved in oxygen-deprived wet clay. Well-preserved remains of some of the timber buildings of the Viking city of Jorvík were discovered, along with workshops, fences, animal pens, privies, pits and wells, together with durable materials and artefacts of the time, such as pottery, metalwork and bones. Between 19, after the old factory was demolished, and prior to the building of the Coppergate Shopping Centre (an open-air pedestrian shopping centre which now occupies the enlarged site), the York Archaeological Trust, a charity founded in 1972 by Peter Addyman, conducted extensive excavations in the area. When he died in 1862 his widow Mary Ann Craven continued the business and a century later, in 1966, Cravens relocated to a new factory on the outskirts of the city. In the 1850s confectioner Thomas Craven acquired a site in Coppergate. Under a glass floor, the original archeological dig is reproduced with actual timbers