Explore the real Britain with The Real Britain Company

If you’re the sort of person who plans holidays around food (guilty), a UK seaside artisan ice cream trail is as good an excuse as any to get sand in your shoes. I’ve slowly realised my ideal beach break looks less like surfing at dawn and more like timing the tide with the opening hours […]

If you’re thinking about a car-free whisky tasting Scotland escape, Speyside is where things start to make sense. Trains, little local buses, distillery paths that smell faintly of malt and woodsmoke, and enough drams to make you very glad you’re nowhere near a steering wheel. I’ve done Speyside with a hire car and without, and […]

If you’re looking for a British rave heritage travel guide in the usual sense – train times, hotel tips, bar lists – you’re going to be disappointed. For me, the “travel” bit of rave has always been the bus back home at 5am, chewing your lip off and trying not to make eye contact with […]

When people plan UK city breaks, they usually start with cathedrals and castles. I start with the food halls. UK city food markets are my version of a sightseeing itinerary: you learn what a place eats, how it argues, and how early it gets going on a Saturday. If I can structure a weekend around […]

I first went looking for Merlin in a gift shop. That’s how a lot of people meet him now. My parents took me to Tintagel when I was about ten. I remember a plastic wizard staff with fake gems, an ocean of tea towels, and a slightly sticky “Arthurian” fudge. None of it told me […]

Ask ten people about English regional pies and you’ll get eleven opinions, most of them angry. I grew up on the Shropshire–Staffordshire border thinking “pie” meant steak & kidney from a foil tray, microwaved to the temperature of fresh lava. It took years of driving lorries and hire vans around the country to realise every […]

I didn’t set out to invent an “East London grime walking tour” for myself, but that’s basically what happened the first few times I wandered around Bow and Stratford with earphones in, trying to line up street names with half-remembered pirate radio sets. I’m from Newcastle, so my teenage years were more about dodgy happy […]

There’s a particular sort of afternoon that only really makes sense in an old British pub: low beams browned with decades of smoke, a handpull that squeaks a bit, and a regular in the corner who looks like he came with the building. That’s the mood behind Britain historic ale trails for me – not […]