Explore the real Britain with The Real Britain Company

When people ask me for “Domesday Book villages to visit”, I usually disappoint them by saying something very un-touristy: the most Domesday-ish places in England often feel oddly ordinary. No tea towel stands with Norman shields, no AR app explaining William the Conqueror. Instead, you get a bend in the road, a squat church, a […]

If you’re looking for things to do in Yorkshire beyond the moors, you very quickly realise the county doesn’t stop at heather and windswept sheep. Follow the roads east and south and it turns into harbours, mills, market halls and places where you’ll find as many forklift trucks as hikers. That’s my comfort zone. I’ve […]

I grew up in landlocked Shropshire, where “the seaside” meant a three-hour drive and a bag of sand in your shoes for a week. So the first time I drove all the way to the far-west of Cornwall, I had this daft idea it would feel like any other British coast, just with more postcards […]

I didn’t care about the Domesday Book at university. It felt like admin: lists of manors, taxes, plough-teams. The sort of thing someone in a beige cardigan would get very excited about in a seminar while you wondered when you could go to the pub. That changed the first time I went to a village […]

I first cared about Sex Pistols because of a bus stop in Wallsend, not some grand moment in rock history. I was about fourteen, it was lashing it down, and a lad from school had a battered tape of Never Mind the Bollocks. He’d taped it off his uncle’s vinyl, so it sounded like it’d […]

If you’re planning a Scottish Highlands road trip and your main reference point is the A9, I have good news: it gets a lot better once you leave it. The Highlands reward people who are happy to go slowly, pull over a lot and accept that mobile signal may abandon them at the worst possible […]

When I first heard about Whitby, I must admit I thought it was one of those overly hyped seaside towns that promise the world but deliver a soggy sandwich. But let me tell you, my expectations were thoroughly dashed, smashed, and then served with a side of fish and chips. Whitby turned out to be […]

I’ve always hated those “David Bowie London travel guide” listicles that tell you to stand outside Brixton station, take a photo with the mural, then go for a flat white and feel like you’ve touched greatness. Bowie deserves better than being reduced to a mural crawl. If you’re going to follow his trail through Britain […]