Long before the cathedrals, this was Anaiwan land. The tableland around Armidale lies within the traditional country of the Anaiwan, also written Anēwan, whose territory once stretched across the New England high country from Guyra and Moree in the north down to Uralla and Walcha. Their language, also known as Nganyaywana, was pushed to the edge of extinction by the dispossession and violence of the colonial frontier, but it has not been lost: a community-led revival program begun in 2016 is teaching it again, including to the youngest children. That living thread runs through the modern city. Armidale is home to the Armidale and Region Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place, and to the Narwan Eels, a rugby league club with a strong Indigenous identity. The Mount Yarrowyck rock art site nearby preserves older marks still.

Few towns this size carry two cathedrals. Armidale is the seat of both the Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops, and their churches define its skyline. St Peter's Anglican Cathedral, all warm brick and sharp lines, was designed by the Canadian-born architect John Horbury Hunt and opened for worship in 1875, its tower added in 1938. The Catholic Cathedral of Saints Mary and Joseph was dedicated in 1919. Between them, the city centre is laid out in a tidy grid. Its main street, Beardy Street, carries an oddly literal name — it honours two bearded stockmen who were among the district's first settlers. The 1850s courthouse still anchors the central district, a survivor of the era when this was a remote outpost of empire.

A grand house gave the city a university. The University of New England was founded in 1938, first as a college of the University of Sydney and then in its own right in 1954, making it the first Australian university established outside a capital city. At its heart stands Booloominbah, the vast Gothic mansion built for the pastoralist White family in the 1880s and gifted to found the college; it serves today as administration and a restaurant. UNE has shaped Armidale into a place of unusual cultural reach for its size, with a strong tradition in the humanities and a long record of agricultural research tied to the surrounding sheep country. Roughly a quarter of the city's people fall in the 10-to-24 age bracket, a young population in an old landscape.

This is wool country, and the city celebrates it. Each year Armidale hosts the Australian Wool Fashion Awards, showcasing Merino wool on the runway, and the New England Wool Expo with its shearing competitions and yard-dog trials. But the tableland weather can turn violent. The city has been battered by extraordinary hailstorms — one in December 2006 destroyed the livestock exhibition centre, which collapsed entirely under the sheer weight of accumulated hail — and in October 2021 a tornado tore roofs from homes and flipped vehicles in the dark. Through it all, Armidale has kept opening its doors. It is now home to a community of around 1,200 Êzidî (Yazidi) refugees who fled persecution in Iraq and put down new roots here, one more thread in a high city that keeps gathering people in.