A market town with industry in its veins, Mansfield was a big source of coal up to the end of the 20th century. In the space of a generation, mining has all but disappeared, but telltale headstocks still stand in places like Clipstone and Pleasley where there’s an absorbing museum. There’s Tudor luxury too, at …
A town suspended in time, Louth is in East Lincolnshire on the cusp of the flowing landscapes of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Still a fixture of Louth’s town centre are local family-run amenities that are now rare other parts of the country. Louth has bakers, butchers and poultry shops, handed down through families since the Victorian …
Grazing the south end of Bodmin Moor, Liskeard is a market town that burgeoned in the 19th century during a copper mining boom. In this Victorian slate and granite townscape are more than a hundred houses designed by one man, Henry Rice, during that frenzy of development. There’s a medieval parish church, a spirited town …
The constituency of the current leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, Islington is a borough in his image. Very popular with young, progressive people, this area has a history of radical left-wing politics. The not so radical left-wingers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made the deal that would define UK politics at the restaurant Granita …
The Brontës, one of the world’s most famous literary families lived in the West Yorkshire village of Haworth in the first half of the 19th century. Anne, Charlotte and Emily spent nearly all of their brief but productive lives at the Haworth Parsonage, where they wrote some masterpieces of English literature like Wuthering Heights and …
In the 1970s and 80s this sandstone mill town hiding in the steep Calder Valley was settled by artists, musicians, New Age practitioners and green activists. They were drawn to the raw beauty of the Yorkshire Pennines but also the cheap but handsome property, at old mills, warehouses, clothiers’ houses and the idiosyncratic double-decker homes …
The adorable market town of Hexham is a short march from Hadrian’s Wall and was built around an abbey founded by the Anglo-Saxons. The abbey’s earliest architecture has been preserved in the crypt, which was constructed 1,300 years ago with stone recycled from a Roman fort. Hexham Abbey presides over a photogenic market place, at …
As a New Town, Hatfield was built almost from nothing after the Second World War to make up for a dire shortage of housing. This mid-century modernist streetscape all cropped up next to Hatfield House, a mansion where Elizabeth I spent some of her childhood and was almost imprisoned in the 16th century. Some of …
A New Town in the west of Essex, Harlow was built after the Second World War to meet England’s Post-War housing shortage. The man who led the design was Sir Frederick Gibberd who had a Utopian vision for Harlow as a place of edification, enriched with art. He helped Harlow assemble one the of the …
Some of the most daunting and awe-inspiring landscapes in England lie just minutes from this neat town in Derbyshire’s High Peak. Glossop is on the western boundary of the Peak District National Park, at a tangle of walking routes like the Trans Pennine Trail, the Pennine Way and the Longdendale Trail. Adventurers won’t resist the …