Explore the real Britain with The Real Britain Company

I came late to early medieval England. At school, 1066 was treated like the franchise reboot: everything before it a muddle of “Angles and Saxons and maybe some Vikings”. It wasn’t until I started doing Norman Conquest history travel for work — tramping round churches and earthworks for museum projects — that I realised something […]

London has a reputation for hoovering money straight out of your wallet. And yes, if you let it, it will. But if you’re willing to ignore the big ticket attractions and lean into the awkwardness of proper budget London travel, you can have a surprisingly good day out for about a fiver – and sometimes […]

If you’re looking for a Rye East Sussex travel guide that actually talks about wet socks, steep cobbles and the smell of frying fish instead of “fairytale vibes”, pull up a chair. Rye is one of those places that gets photographed to death – Mermaid Street, timber-framed houses, all very pretty – but what makes […]

I always trace my obsession with Amy Winehouse back to a scratched supermarket CD copy of Frank I bought in late 2004, chucked in one of those two-for-£10 deals between Keane and The Killers. I was 19, back home in Newcastle for Christmas from a rubbish first term at uni, working breakfast shifts in a […]

If your feed looks anything like mine, the Isle of Skye appears to be made up entirely of three things: the Old Man of Storr, the Fairy Pools, and people in bright jackets standing on cliffs that would give your mother palpitations. That’s the glossy version. This is an attempt at something a bit different: […]

When people ask me about “post-Roman Britain travel”, they usually mean mosaics, legions and Hadrian’s Wall tea rooms. What they rarely mean is the bit afterwards – the two or three centuries where the textbooks go hazy, the dates get approximate, and school charts jump from “Romans leave” to “Anglo-Saxons arrive” as if someone politely […]

If your idea of the Lake District everyday life is polished viewpoints and perfectly timed golden-hour photos over Derwentwater, you’re only getting half the story. The other half is a pile of wet waterproofs steaming over a pub radiator, a bus that’s mysteriously “not in service”, and a local arguing (politely) with a walker about […]

I didn’t go to London to find The Clash. I went, like most northerners of a certain age, for crap temp jobs, late buses, and the hope of catching a band I loved somewhere smaller than an arena. But those walks between bedsits, kitchens and night buses slowly turned into my own crooked version of […]