London is the place to start. Nowhere in the country can match the scope and innovation of the metropolis, a colossal, frenetic city, perhaps not as immediately attractive as its European counterparts, but with so much variety that the only obstacle to a great time is the shockingly high cost of everything. It's here that you'll find Britain's best spread of nightlife, cultural events, museums, galleries, pubs and restaurants. The other large cities, such as Birmingham, Newcastle, Leeds or Liverpool each have their strengths: Birmingham has a resurgent arts scene, for example, while people travel for miles to sample Newcastle's nightlife. These days Manchester can match the capital for glamour in cafés and clubs, and also boasts the inimitable draw of the world's best-known football team.
England's ancient cathedral cities, such as Lincoln, York, Salisbury, Durham and Winchester , cannot be equalled for sheer physical beauty. Wherever you're based, you're never more than a few miles from a ruined castle, a majestic country house, a secluded chapel or a monastery. In the southwest there are remnants of a Celtic culture that was all but eradicated elsewhere by the Romans, and everywhere you can find traces of prehistoric settlers - most famously the megalithic circles of Stonehenge and Avebury .
Most beguiling of all are the long-established villages of England, hundreds of which amount to nothing more than a pub, a shop, a gaggle of cottages and a farmhouse offering bed and breakfast. Devon, Cornwall , the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales harbour some especially picturesque specimens, but every county can boast a decent showing. Then, of course, there's the English countryside, an extraordinarily diverse terrain from which Constable, Turner, Wordsworth, Emily Brontë and a host of other writers and artists took inspiration. Exmoor, Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor , the North York Moors and the Lake District are the most dramatic and best known of the national parks, each offering an array of landscapes crisscrossed with walking routes.
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Top Destination Cities
- Stretching for more than thirty miles at its broadest point, LONDON is by far the largest city in Europe. The majority of its sights are situated to the north of the River Thames, which loops through the city from west to east. However, there is no single predominant focus of interest, for London has grown not through centralized planning but by a process of agglomeration - villages and urban developments that once surrounded the core are now lost within the amorphous mass of Greater London. Hotel Accommodation London England
- If anywhere can be described as the first purely industrial conurbation, it is BIRMINGHAM . Unlike the more specialist industrial towns that grew up across the north and Midlands, "Brum" - and its "Brummies" - turned its hand to every kind of manufacturing, gaining the epithet "the city of 1001 trades".
Hotel Accommodation Birmingham England
- At first glance NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE - virtual capital of the area between Yorkshire and Scotland - may appear to be just another northern industrial conurbation, but the banks of the Tyne have been settled for nearly two thousand years and the city consequently has a greater breadth of attractions than many of its rivals. The Romans were the first to bridge the river here, and the "new castle" appeared as long ago as 1080. In the seventeenth century a regional monopoly on coal export brought wealth and power to Newcastle and - as well as giving a new expression to the English language - engendered its other great industry, shipbuilding.
Hotel Accommodation Newcastle upon Tyne England
- Yorkshire's commercial capital, and one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, LEEDS has undergone a radical transformation in recent years. There's still a true northern grit to its character, and in many of its dilapidated suburbs, but the grime has been removed from the Victorian centre and the city is revelling in its renaissance as a financial, administrative and cultural boomtown.
Hotel Accommodation Leeds England
- Once the empire's second city, LIVERPOOL spent too many of the twentieth-century postwar years struggling against adversity. Things are looking up at last, as economic and social regeneration brightens the centre and old docks. Yet - even as any short-term visitor to the city could tell you - nothing ever broke Liverpool's extraordinary spirit of community, a spirit that emerged strongly in the aftermath of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster of 1989, when the deaths of 95 Liverpool supporters seemed to unite the whole city. Indeed, acerbic wit and loyalty to one of the city's two football teams are the linchpins of Scouse culture - though Liverpool makes great play of its musical heritage, which is reasonable enough from the city that produced The Beatles.
Hotel Accommodation Liverpool England
- Few cities in the world have embraced social change so heartily as MANCHESTER . From engine of the Industrial Revolution to test-bed of contemporary urban design, the city has no realistic provincial English rival. Its domestic dominance expresses itself in various ways, most swaggeringly in the success of Manchester United, the richest football club in Britain, but also in a thriving music and cultural scene that has given birth to world-beaters as diverse as the Hallé Orchestra and Oasis.
Hotel Accommodation Manchester England
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