Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to England

This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a great travel companion when youre on the road.

From the fills you in on history, architecture, literature, music and film.

Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed in the , accessible from the table of contents. Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. The screen-lock function on your device is recommended when viewing enlarged maps. Make sure you have the latest software updates, too.

Throughout the guide, weve flagged up our favourite places a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric caf, a special restaurant with the author pick icon . You can select your own favourites and create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible access to everything youll need for your time away.

Robin Hoods Bay, North Yorkshire

No one enjoys knocking England more than the English, but modesty and self-deprecation aside this nation retains a boundless capacity to surprise, charm and thrill. For a small country, England has a regional diversity with few parallels from rugged coasts to ancient woodlands, cricket-green villages to post-industrial towns but what draws most visitors to England is its long and colourful history, grisly and glorious in equal measure, as brought to life through the countrys trail of wonderful heritage sights and museums. While the 2016 Brexit vote hints at a nation hung up on those glory days, much of England remains progressive and forward-looking the national character is defined as much by multiethnic urban communities, international arts festivals and sky-piercing architecture as by afternoon tea, BBC dramas and fish n chips.

Whether youre in the market for city breaks and shopping sprees, or hanker after a muddy weekend in the country, theres an abundance of options for a fabulous break. Youll eat well, too. England has an ever-expanding choice of excellent food and drink locally sourced and seasonally produced, championed in cafs, restaurants and pubs, at food festivals and farmers markets in every corner of the nation challenging every outmoded stereotype about dreary British cuisine.

The English do heritage amazingly well. There are first-class museums all over the country (many of them free), and whats left of the nations green and pleasant land is protected with passion and skill. Indeed, ask an English person to define their nation in terms of whats worth seeing and youre most likely to have your attention drawn to the golden rural past the village green, the duck pond, the hedgerow-fringed winding lane. And it really is impossible to overstate the bucolic attractions of the various regions, from Cornwall to the Lake District, or the delights they provide from hiking trails and prehistoric stone circles to rickety pubs and arcane festivals. Dont be entirely misled by the chocolate boxes and the postcards, however farming today forms just a tiny proportion of the national income and theres a marked dislocation between the urban population and the small rural communities, many of which are struggling.

Englands towns and cities also have more than their fair share of heritage and historic attractions, which, when matched with the buzzy energy of regeneration and innovation, can make a very heady mix for every person who wants to stand outside the gates of Buckingham Palace or visit the Houses of Parliament, theres another who makes a beeline for the latest show at Tate Modern, the bars of Manchesters Northern Quarter or Brightons winding Lanes. Urban civic pride is not a new phenomenon for the English, however. In fact, its been steady since the Industrial Revolution, and industry and the Empire it inspired has provided a framework for much of what youll see as you travel around. Virtually every town bears a mark of former wealth and power, be it a magnificent Gothic cathedral financed from a monarchs treasury, a parish church funded by the tycoons of the medieval wool trade, or a triumphalist civic building raised on the back of the slave and sugar trades. In the south of England youll find old dockyards from which the Royal Navy patrolled the oceans, while in the north there are vast, hulking mills that employed entire towns. Englands museums and galleries several of them ranking among the worlds finest are full of treasures trawled from its imperial conquests. And in their grandiose stuccoed terraces and wide esplanades, the old seaside resorts bear testimony to the heyday of English holiday towns, at one time as fashionable as any European spa.

Angel of the North, Gateshead

To begin to get to grips with England, London is the place to start. Nowhere else in the country can match the scope and innovation of the capital city, a colossal, vibrant metropolis whose increasingly cluttered skyline features some of the most recognizable buildings in the world. Its here that youll find Englands best spread of nightlife, cultural events, museums, galleries, pubs, shops and restaurants, its most mixed population, and its most fully developed tourist infrastructure.

The capital is an irresistible destination and should not, on any account, be missed. However, each of the other large cities Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool among them makes its own claim for historic and cultural diversity, and you certainly wont have a representative view of Englands urban life if you venture no further than London. And to some extent its in these regional centres that the most exciting architectural and social developments are taking place, though for many visitors, as tourist attractions, they rank well behind ancient cities like Canterbury, York, Salisbury, Durham, Lincoln and Winchester to name a few of those with the most celebrated of Englands cathedrals the gorgeous Georgian ensemble in Bath, or the venerable university cities of Cambridge and Oxford