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…
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”…
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…
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 –…
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…
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…
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?…
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…
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…
