England travel guide

How much space should we devote to prehistoric Stonehenge; to centuries of Roman, Norman and Viking conquest; to the signing of the Magna Carta; to legendary battles, peasant uprisings and hundred-year wars? Can we afford to skip Dickens, Shakespeare, Florence Nightingale, Scott of the Antarctic, the Beatles, Guy Fawkes, Spike Milligan, Robin Hood and his Merry Men or Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain? Should we include world-changing discoveries such as Newton’s laws of motion and Darwin’s laws of evolution? Then what about King Alfred burning the cakes and the Great Fire burning London; kings either chopping the heads off their queens, or having their own chopped off instead and the beginnings of the industrial revolution that reshaped the world and triggered the global warming we face today? What of the Napoleonic wars, Empire, Commonwealth, fish ‘n’ chips, the 1966 World Cup and, of course, Brexit?

One of the main takeways we’d like readers of this England travel guide to, er, take away, is that England is not synonymous with London. In the capital you can admire the Tower of London and Houses of Parliament, Fleet Street, London Bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Cutty Sark and a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. But English history is etched across every inch of the country like a living, breathing biography. There are the White Cliffs of Dover over which the RAF and the Luftwaffe did battle during World War II; our railways and canals, backbone of trade and industry before cars came along; the steelworks of Sheffield and the shipbuilding yards of Southampton and Liverpool; the Pilgrims’ Way from Winchester to Canterbury; the Lake District, where Wordsworth wandered lonely as a cloud; our ancient castles, cathedrals, palatial stately homes, our universities and Roman villas.

It’s a gross exaggeration to say that English history is world history, but precious few other countries can be said to have had such influence, positive or otherwise, on the global stage for so long. One thing is for sure though: English history has never been dull. And like the English people’s preoccupation with the weather, which is rarely the same from one day to the next, our history is constantly undergoing new interpretations and conclusions. If you confine yourself to London when on vacation here, you’ll only ever grasp a fraction of it.