How much of this fair land of ours have you lads actually visited?
I've just been thinking about it and there's so many places in Britain I've never particularly laid my eyes on, especially the scenery and landscapes of Scotland. What are the "hidden gems" here that you would recommend people really should visit at least once in their lives? Unhidden gems too, for that matter.
>>438646 >I would personally recommend North Devon
Agreed - this is the thing about Cornwall - it's a tourist shithole where the people are fucking yokels. It's a lot like Florida in that it has beautiful scenery spoiled mostly by the locals and their pursuit of the tourist coin. Devon is next door, there is much less traffic and its the smarter holiday destination.
Looking for recommendations of places that are a nice walk, and a nice drive on the way, because I've just got a new motor. Let's say I'm setting off from Beeston.
My favourite place was probably Snowdonia, it was only let down by being rammed with posh southern tourists and all the pubs charging accordingly. I've been all over the Dales and a fair few places in the Peaks, I've never visited the Lake District and I've been meaning to go up to Scotland for years but never got around to it.
The lakes are lovely but will also be ram packed at the minute. Lancashire is very nice, but as you're from The Other Place it's probably too close to home and also your bitter rivalry will ruin the experience.
Scotland is personally my idea of a lovely place with a lovely drive, basically the whole fucking lot of it, but the North Coast 500 route is full of the sorts of locations you describe, and the drive is, of course, spectacular.
I'm not up on how friendly Scottish people are to us dragging our viruses across the border and wandering about small towns at the moment, but if it's all okay, then that's what I'd be doing.
My missus lived there for the best part of her childhood so she has a bit of the accent, I could get her to do all the talking to conceal our Englishness.
Any particular recommendations? More seriously, I'll leave it til next year if the Scots are still taking the 'rona a bit more seriously than we are down here, but it'd be good to know.
Would a holiday home be a decent investment? By this I mean buying on a holiday park rather than an actual house where someone could live. It's my last day in Cornwall and these are for sale where I'm staying:-
They're leasehold, with about 960 years left on the lease, and there will be costs like cleaning and site fees but properties similar to the one listed for £40k were being let out for over a grand per week this summer, albeit with refurbished kitchens and bathrooms. I can't imagine there's much potential for the resale value to go up but it seems like a decent investment unless I'm missing a fairly obvious catch.
>>438734 Walking in the Yorkshire Wolds in mid-Spring is an absolute joy. Disused railway tracks, chalk hills, dales and glacial valleys. A properly underrated part of the country.
Please come visit unless you're from West Yorkshire or a Southerner.
>>447987 I have wanted to buy train tickets to Northern towns around Manchester ever since Northern Rail was nationalised, and today I went to Blackpool. It's nice enough that it didn't feel interesting or different from what I'm used to, and so I wound up slightly disappointed. Also, I went on my own and it's November. Anyway, I thought to myself at one point that I have also been to Rochdale, because it's the end of the line on the Manchester Metrolink, and that felt weirder and more exotic than Blackpool did, even though I didn't even need a train to get there.
Today I went to Tadcaster. It's the closest experience I've had to being in Wonkaville because the town is completely dominated by the relatively huge John Smiths factory, which looms over everything. The town centre felt like a bit of a ghost town, as there were many buildings in a state of disrepair which looked like they'd been boarded up long ago and many shop fronts had window frames made of wood which had long since gone rotten. Outskirts seemed alright though.
A friend of mine introduced me to a rum and coke at a Samuel Smith pub. Because they're insistent on everything, not just the beer, coming from the Old Brewery or businesses associated with it, you get a nice rum and a proper old-fashioned cola rather than Coca-Cola mix in fizzy water. It's absolutely fucking delightful, even if you wouldn't normally drink rum or coke.
>>448818 It was late morning when I went and the pubs I remember going past weren't open at that time. I did pick up Excession by Iain Banks for 10p in one of the charity shops though.
Me and a couple of mates got a train up there (I think? Can't quite remember) once so we could do a "tour" of all the Sam Smith's pubs. But once we got there we realised quite quickly it was a bit of a Royston Vasey situation, we went in the first pub, which was a really big and quite classy one, and it was full of pensioners politely (and fucking silently) eating lunch. Really odd vibe, like if we said the wrong thing their eyes would all light up and they'd turn to face us in unison, screeching, and descend upon us.
We didn't dare actually get drunk because we knew we'd stick out like a sore thumb, so in the end we just bought a few bottles over the counter and went home.
>>448820 I know it was a weekday morning but what stuck out to me is that, other than a dimly lit tea room full of pensioners, everything else was polared. Nobody was in the butchers, barbers, hairdressers, opticians, dentists or any of the shops I walked past. The person I was with told me that anybody with any sense locally moved to the likes of Boston Spa, leaving only the dregs in Tadcaster.
Been around various parts of Birmingham today. What a shithole. It felt like just about everything there has been purposefully designed to make you feel glum.
I've always been quite fond of Birmingham, but I do have a soft spot for post-industrial decay, Asian supermarkets and needlessly confusing road layouts.
>>449948 It did seem like every 100 metres or so one road was merging into another, so drivers constantly cutting off other cars. The roads were by far more aggressive than anywhere else I've been in this country.
>>449949 The worst driving I've ever seen for a city was Bournemouth. Manchester's Curry Mile (Rusholme) is even worse, but that's just one long street and the rest of Manchester drives normally, so Bournemouth is still the worst for me.
>>449946 I've only been to the centre, Alum Rock, and Shard End, and thought it was quite pleasant. Having said that, I grew up in Bradford, so areas full of sari shops and shitty takeaways are nostalgic for me.
>>447989 I went on a second "support Northern Rail by buying a random ticket" day out today, and I chose to visit the delightful and exciting city of Preston. It's very nice, but that could have just been the weather. I did like it, but it feels very strange, like it has no personality at all. It's a perfectly wonderful small provincial city with absolutely no identity. I wanted to take a picture of myself near a famous landmark, so I went to the bus station with its acclaimed architecture. It's a good thing I did, because that's really all Preston has. All the other buildings that you'd expect to be in big squares, like Preston Town Hall and the Guildhall for example, are actually hidden away on small side streets. Stephen Hendry owns a snooker club in Preston, so I thought I could go there and just fuck around on a table if I got really stuck, but it's miles away from central Preston so in the end I just went to the park. It's an absurdly hilly park, but again, it is very nice.
The utter lack of obvious tourist attractions in Preston is making me reconsider my plans to go to famously dull places like Blackburn and Burnley. Even if they just have different accents and funny-coloured wheelie bins, that would be enough for me, but Preston couldn't even manage that. Although again, the park is nice, and has free public toilets like a true socialist paradise.
>>451336 Bugger. I don't think I did. I pretty much went up and down Fishergate and a few streets near there; I saw a couple of quite boring statues (Robert Peel by the small park with a silly name, like Winky Park or something) but if they were interesting colours then I missed them.
>>451343 I know the faces are ridiculous, but I don't entirely hate this. It represents workers being killed, and the workers are all memorable, distinct individuals. The killers, meanwhile, look cool but they're all the same, identical copies of each other. It's a shame the expressions are so absurd, because other than that, it's quite a good piece of art. I can certainly see what the artist was going for with it.
That's a scarily accurate description of my lackluster hometown.
Not far from where you were, you could have taken a delightful stroll down Old Cock Yard to see the garage (or remnants of,) where they found the remains of a suspected Peter Sutcliffe victim.
>>451349 Do you pronounce Aqueduct Street as Ack-ee-dock. My Dad and Grandad did (with tounge somewhat in cheek knowing that it was wrong, but just doing it the local way).
>>451335 Since I posted this, I have also been to Bradford (very nice but it's disappointingly difficult to find a proper curry place) and Burnley (it's so much nicer than I expected but incredibly dull; I visited my friend and we went drinking and I wound up unable to get home again), and today I went to Liverpool. I had no idea Liverpool was so touristy. It's like a theme park for football and the Beatles which is mental considering the actual best band from Liverpool is The Lightning Seeds, with stalls selling souvenirs in the street and everything. I was not expecting that.
Liverpool is also great to walk around, with something on every street, and it's much more scenic than Manchester. I must say I am aghast at how the legendarily left-wing city, full of outright communists, was so blatantly built on the proceeds of slavery. I know what sort of fantastic 19th-century architecture you get from the slave trade, and Liverpool's imposing and glorious city centre was really, obviously, paid for by selling Africans to the Caribbean. What would Militant Tendency say?
But speaking of architecture, holy fuck, why have I never heard of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral? I spent all afternoon wandering randomly, and I turned a corner and set off down a subdued side street which just happened to contain a motherfucking spaceship. It doesn't even belong to a weird cult like Heaven's Gate or the Scientologists; it was made for bloody Catholics. I wound up spending probably half an hour today just walking round it and admiring it; I am downright in love with this building. (I didn't go inside, though, because I think there was some service going on and I didn't want to interrupt the penitent God-bothering). I assume some people refer to this thriller with words like "eyesore" and "monstrosity", but fuck those people; it's incredible. The greatest achievements in art are when something is incredibly mental but somehow still makes perfect sense, and that's what this futuristic beauty achieves. And to think, I almost missed it.
Here is a picture I took earlier today. There are also a couple of pictures of me looking at it, including one with a frankly embarrassing YouTube thumbnail-face. That's how utterly disrupted my whole approach to architecture has been by this divine revelation. Fuck the rest of Liverpool; it's fine enough but it's nothing compared to the retrofuturist magic of a priest's house.
When I was a teenager, I once did a shitload of mushrooms and went to mass at the Metropolitan Cathedral. It took me about three weeks to come back to earth. We did weird things to amuse ourselves before the internet.
It amuses me that the Catholic cathedral in Liverpool would have been a huge but dull Italianate dome if they hadn't run out of money during the war. The Gibberd design was to some extent a cheap post-war prefab and was massively controversial at the time, but the budget constraints forced them to entertain something a bit mad that went on to become iconic.
>>458455 You need to mingle more with the locals when you do these trips. The attraction of Liverpool and Manchester should really be the warm nature of the locals, much as you should really visit the Scottish highlands to enjoy their culture of stopping to have a chat with everyone they meet.
>>458471 >The attraction of Liverpool and Manchester should really be the warm nature of the locals
Is going up norf for sex tourism worth it? A lot of the northern transplants I talk to complain about the frigidness of southern lasses and how much easier it is to pull back home.
>>458455 >I assume some people refer to this thriller with words like "eyesore" and "monstrosity"
It's affectionately known as "Paddy's Wigwam". I hope you did a 180 thereafter and walked down Hope Street, that's where the Philharmonic and some of the greatest pubs are. And eventually you may have found our other Cathedral lurking at the end. Sounds like you had a decent time, and there's a better one in store if you come back with a bunch of mates.
>>458476 Northerners are generally warmer and more open than Southerners. Money grabbing is probably the wrong word but I'd say Southerners tend to treat interactions on a more transactional basis, calculating what they can get out of you.
>>458471 You could well be right, but how would I do such a thing? Go in a pub and drink alone till someone approaches me? Stop people in the street and ask them what their favourite building is? I'm a charming and friendly guy when I have at least one friend already with me, but on my own I am an absolute turbo-sperg and debilitating social coward.
>>458483 I did indeed walk past the Philharmonic on my way to the other cathedral. Unfortunately, with so many things to see and absolutely no plan, I only looked at the outside of buildings and no other building exterior even came close to the big MC. I also wasted over an hour trying to walk to those big electricity windmills (I walked down Great something Street, starting near the Liver Building and walking north for hours and hours), but I never actually reached them before I gave up and turned back.
>>458491 >I also wasted over an hour trying to walk to those big electricity windmills (I walked down Great something Street, starting near the Liver Building and walking north for hours and hours)
Sounds like Great Howard Street; you did the right thing by turning back because those are right on the waterfront inside the container port, so you have fortunately been denied a sore neck by get near enough to 'em. Early on you might have seen a pretty bland windowless tower that may have looked like some sort of silo peeking above the roof of Costco - or perhaps you may have already discovered the ventilation tower for the other end of the Queensway tunnel across the river while at the Pier Head. Those things look like a 1950's concept for a rocket launchpad, and I wouldn't have even considered it if you hadn't described the RC Cathedral as a spaceship!
>>458501 That's definitely where I went; I don't know how far I went but I know I passed Costco very early on. I also saw this derelict building that was very optimistically described as being full of investment opportunities. I turned back around the blue cranes, and I saw something that looked like a football stadium which I presume will one day be Everton's new ground.
Oh yeah, the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouses. There used to be a bustling sunday market there which took all day to get around, and you'd still go home having bought nothing at all. I swear people just went there to do a few laps of the place. The largest building is being renovated into Duplex Flats that very few fuckers will be able to afford to live in.
I went on another random day trip to another Northern city. Today, I went to Sheffield. I am absolutely convinced I didn't get the full experience, because I got off the train and started walking, as I always do, and it seems like the whole area around the station belongs to Sheffield Hallam University, so I felt unwelcome since I went to a good university. I like snooker so I went and took a picture of the Crucible, and then I just wandered randomly and it really didn't work. There are maps all over the place, which is an excellent thing, but they are all rotated so that the top of the map is the direction you are facing rather than north, and this makes it very difficult to find anything. I found Bramall Lane football stadium, but I got there just as 20,000 miserable and angry football fans were walking in the opposite direction. At one point I even considered getting a tram to Rotherham for a 2-for-1 of Northern towns.
The shopping is very good, though. That was my favourite thing about Sheffield. Normally I spend all day wandering about with my bag-for-life in my pocket, but I never use it because I don't want to carry a load of shopping around with me. But today, I bought a bottle from Nisbet's that I can put my homemade hot sauce in, and this inspired me to go back to Decathlon and spend over £100 on stuff I could just as easily have bought back in Manchester. I'm going to Iceland (the country, not the supermarket) next year and I need a new coat for that, and the one I got is very warm and comfy.
Another thing I didn't like was when I saw a cool bridge and went over for a closer look, and instead of going over a nice river, it just goes over a road. I don't know what the bridge is called, but it's near the National Videogame Museum, which I very nearly went in but instead decided to go and look at the bridge. And this is probably why I am a crappy tourist who misses a lot of the worthwhile attractions.
Oh, and Sheffield's cathedral is very small too. Overall, I'd say Sheffield is better than Preston, but slightly worse than Bradford. The late-November sun was very low all day as well and was constantly in my eyes, and obviously that's not Sheffield's fault but I certainly didn't like it. I dread to think what great things I must have missed while I was there.