Explore the real Britain with The Real Britain Company

If you live in Sheffield or Manchester, the Peak District is that friend who lives round the corner that you never quite see enough of. It’s painfully easy to get there, which is why people tend to assume they’ll “do it properly one day” and then never do. This Peak District weekend itinerary is my […]

I’ve never trusted anyone who calls punk a phase. A haircut is a phase. Learning the chords to “Wonderwall” is a phase. UK punk was more like someone rewiring the electrics in the house while the power was still on. You can still hear it humming through pop, through stadium rock, through every lad in […]

If you’re looking at your car keys and feeling vaguely resentful, you’re not alone. I grew up in Shropshire, which trains forgot for a while, so driving felt compulsory. But over time, I’ve grown fond of leaving the keys on the kitchen table and seeing how far buses and trains can actually get me. Spoiler: […]

I fell into the habit of choosing a UK holiday cottage the way most of us do: four tabs open, all blurring into one long corridor of exposed beams, “cozy lounges” and suspiciously artful throws. After one too many weeks spent in places that looked like Nancy Meyers film sets online and like student housing […]

If you’d told me at fourteen that one day someone would ask me to write about a “Blur Britpop London walking tour”, I’d have laughed and gone back to taping “Girls & Boys” off the Top 40 on Metro Radio. I was a Newcastle kid; London was that place southerners moaned about on the telly. […]

I first came across the phrase “Peasants’ Revolt travel route” in a rather dry local guide from the 1980s, which made it sound like a sort of medieval coach tour with pitchforks. The more I read, and the more time I spent tracing bits of the 1381 rising on modern roads and footpaths, the more […]

Working out what to wear for walking in the UK is a bit like trying to dress for three different countries at once. One minute you’re leaning on a pub garden fence, pint in hand, the next you’re being sandblasted on a Derbyshire edge, wondering why your “waterproof” is behaving like kitchen roll. Over the […]

If you’ve only ever used Britain small town buses as something to stare at from a train window, you’re missing the good stuff. The big-city networks get all the glory – London’s tap-and-go smugness, Manchester’s trams, Edinburgh being… Edinburgh – but the real character lives in those hourly (if you’re lucky) buses that connect small […]