Explore the real Britain with The Real Britain Company

If you’ve grown up in the Midlands, as I did, canals are less “romantic waterways” and more “shortcut to the chippy if the towpath isn’t flooded”. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve started to see Britain’s post-industrial canal cities as places you’d actually plan a trip around, rather than drive past on […]

If you’d told teenage me that one day people would pay good money for an “Adele Tottenham walking tour”, I’d have laughed and asked if it came with a free Oyster top-up and a bag of chips. Back then, Tottenham – like the bit of Newcastle I grew up in – wasn’t somewhere outsiders romanticised. […]

Living with the wind is the price of admission for slow travel Orkney Islands style. You don’t really “visit” these islands so much as let them wear you down gently, like an old jumper that ends up fitting better after a few washes. Come for the headline archaeology if you like, but the bit that […]

If slow travel Shropshire had a slogan, it would probably be: “We’ll get there when we get there — have you packed the biscuits?” This is not a county that shouts. It sits quietly between Wales and the Midlands, shrugging off motorways and big attractions, and getting on with being low-key spectacular in its own […]

Until my late twenties, Hadrian’s Wall lived in my head as a single line: one emperor, one big decision, a neat stone barrier keeping “Romans” on one side and “barbarians” on the other. If you’d asked me to picture it, I’d have drawn a straight cartoon wall with a legionary on top and a Scot […]

I didn’t set out to write a Led Zeppelin UK travel guide. I was trying to work out why a band that broke up before I was born still feels louder than half the acts clogging up festival posters, and I kept coming back to physical places. Specific streets, pubs, studios. I’m a food and […]

I grew up just over the border in Shropshire, so Wales was always “over there” – the place with better rugby and worse road signs. These days, when people ask me about hidden places in Wales, they want the big hitters without crowds. But the bits that stick with me aren’t the Instagram cliffs; they’re […]

I like Liverpool best when I’m nowhere near a Beatles tribute act. Nothing against them – I’ve hummed along to Hey Jude with the rest of the hen parties – but if you’re looking for things to do in Liverpool beyond the Beatles, you start to see a different city entirely. One that smells of […]