Bedfordshire’s county town is a leafy settlement on the River Great Ouse. That waterway and its Victorian Embankment, gardens and Suspension Bridge all bring sophistication to the town centre. For culture and aviation history, the Higgins Art Gallery & Museum and the Shuttleworth Collection are two top-notch museums in their fields. Bedford has had a …
On the Somerset coast before the Bristol Channel becomes the Atlantic Ocean, Minehead is a traditional seaside town with magnificent inland scenery. Minehead is skirted by the Exmoor National Park, and is the trailhead for the South West Coast Path on its 630-mile route around Devon and Cornwall. There’s a spacious sandy beach, a quaint …
If there is one place name in London that instantly brings to mind the capital’s Afro-Caribbean community its Brixton. Like any working class area in London Brixton once had an edge, but in April 1981 this place earned particular notoriety as the scene of a riot brought about by inequality and unemployment. On the flipside …
Kent’s historic trading centre had a handy position on the navigable River Medway, which joins the Thames Estuary not far north at Chatham. Even now, Maidstone is in a great location to see the best of Kent, known as the Garden of England. Resting in this verdant landscape are monuments like Leeds Castle, which floats …
This Cornish harbour town is not far from the most westerly and southerly points of the British mainland at Land’s End’s and the Lizard. The town is protected by the beautiful Mount’s Bay, around St Michael’s Mount, a magical tidal island. Cornwall is one of the few places in the country where subtropical and Mediterranean …
Right on the border with Wales, Chester was founded in AD 70 as the Roman fortress of Deva Victrix. Excavations at the amphitheatre suggest that Deva was pegged to become the UK’s Roman capital in the 3rd Century if the invasion of Ireland had gone ahead. The City Walls have big curtains of ashlar blocks …
An old-school English seaside resort, Lincolnshire’s Skegness has a Blue Flag beach, a Victorian pier, fairground rides and a line-up of nostalgic family amusements. Most of the appeal is on or near Grand Parade, along a strip of foreshore intersecting with the pier and embroidered with gardens. The resort’s abiding mascot is the Jolly Fisherman, …
England’s surfing paradise, Newquay has astonishing Blue Flag beaches lashed by the North Atlantic. Surfing is a year-round proposition at the resort, but there’s a special energy in summer, when the population quadruples and events like the Boardmasters Festival hit town. The surf beaches draw a young and hip crowd, but there are also inlets …
In the 15th century Boston was the wealthiest port outside London. Set in the Fens, a region of farmland reclaimed from coastal marshes by the Wash, Boston was where English wool was loaded onto ships to trade with Hanseatic league cities. The affluence of that period is unmistakeable in the Perpendicular tower of St Botolph’s …
The market town of Cheltenham would never be the same again after its mineral springs were discovered in the 1700s. This triggered a hundred-year wave of development that peaked in the Regency era in the first decades of the 19th century. With Neoclassical spa facilities, terraces of stuccoed townhouses and opulent gardens, Cheltenham has been …