Explore the real Britain with The Real Britain Company

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 […]

My relationship with London Black Death history started, oddly enough, with a badly drawn rat. I was about ten. A primary school project, one of those sugar-paper posters with titles in bubble writing: “THE PLAGUE!!!” I remember sketching a sort of mutant mouse with red eyes and being told the Black Death came, lots of […]

If you’d told my fourteen-year-old self in Newcastle that one day someone would ask for a “Britpop walking tour UK”, I’d have assumed it meant trudging from HMV to Our Price trying to find a copy of The Great Escape that wasn’t scratched. That was the tour: Metro into town, WHSmith for the magazines, Greggs […]

My relationship with the Domesday Book started with a bored teenage me in a draughty county record office, flicking through a modern English translation and thinking, “So this is it? A long shopping list?” Years later, walking into tiny Deerhurst church in Gloucestershire and realising its tower was already old when Domesday was compiled in […]

If your idea of Norfolk is queues for the car park at Wells and dodging ice creams on Cromer pier, I’ve got good news. There’s another side to the county where the horizons are wide, the roads are mostly empty and the loudest thing you’ll hear is a curlew. Call it Norfolk slow travel if […]

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 […]