Ports, rivers, canals, railways, pilgrims’ pathways: these oft-overlooked, deeply engaging towns grew around transport and, as they expanded, created local networks. We usually think of leisure travel in terms of long-distance trains, cars on open roads, coaches from A to B and country walks. But suburban bus trips, urban hikes and commuter trains offer rich possibilities.
Wolverhampton, West Midlands
Approaching from the north by rail, it’s where the green turns grey, though not unrelentingly. A canal, a railway, riotous quantities of buddleia, garish splashes of graffiti. The first big-brand box to come into view is Tesla, which looks like the cars – hermetically sealed, plasticky, futuristic but without flair. Beside it is a mountain of scrap metal: the end of all car journeys. Two centres of learning are next up. One is the Thomas Telford university technical college – named, aptly, for the colossus of roads. A slick looking building closer to the line is the National Brownfield Institute. This, too, is right at home; all it surveys is potentiality and prospects of a good return.
A serious built-up area will produce different emotions in different people at different times. I live in a farmhouse; I’ve not been out for two weeks. I can feel my shins twitching. Edgelands can be exhilarating.
Wolverhampton became a city in 2000. It feels and looks as if it’s been one for 150 years. It has grand civic buildings, a serious railway station, a flash multi-platformed bus station. My first stop is the Posada, a proper city pub. I’ve been told the Black Country still drinks mild but the man behind the bar tells me he bought a keg for some Camra chaps, but they had two halves and never came back, and he was left with a drink no one wanted. Perhaps I’m not in the real Black Country yet?
Across the road is the city-sized art gallery. Without prompting from me, a staff member takes me back to the entrance and tells me to make sure I see that building and that obelisk, adding that TE Lawrence drank at the Posada and Jim Lea of Slade is a regular visitor to the gallery. Lawrence of Arabia? “Yes, apparently he worked in engineering,” she says. I look him up. Apparently, TE was overseeing the assembly of a new batch of RAF boat engines at Henry Meadows Ltd. He called Wolverhampton “squalid” and a “cesspit” – his lodgings were allegedly bug-infested – adding that it had “the worse mannered local press of my experience!”
The gallery has the UK’s largest pop art collection outside London. Curator David Rodgers began collecting in the late 1960s when the style was new and controversial – and pieces affordable. Parts of the media thought he was squandering public money. But he was a visionary. I spent an hour all by myself with world-class works including a 1964 Warhol oil, Jacqueline, and one of his Campbell’s Soup screenprints, Roy Lichtenstein’s Purist Painting With Bottles (1975) and Pauline Boty’s tender portrait of Marilyn Monroe, Colour Her Gone (1962). Captions by local LGBTQ+ opinion-formers added a queer slant. Patrick Caulfield’s 1971 painting Tandoori Restaurant – in shades of turmeric and saffron flower – truly belongs here in the West Midlands.
Wolverhampton’s motto is “Out of darkness cometh light”. The Black Country was once “the workshop of the world”. Areas had specialisms, as did genders in some cases. There were female chainmakers in Cradley Heath. Children could start making nails from the age of seven. Wolverhampton was known for its locks, keys, horseshoes, as well as grease, beer and kitchen furniture. Japanning was a huge trade. A cabinet on the first floor is filled with exquisite brooches, belt buckles, rosaries, buttons and pendants made in Bilston, formerly a powerhouse of “decorative enamel production”. It was also home to houseware brand Beldray.
Ed Isaacs, a retired Wolverhampton council housing officer, has reinvented himself as an urban sketcher. His drawings capture the contemporary sprawl-scape: Lidl stores, Greggs branches, parked cars, landfill sites, street furniture, tubing and piping and the unexplained bits of industry that jut out from weeds and behind railings. He calls it “obsessive markmaking”. There is an evolving tradition of West Midlands new impressionism; the works of Ed Isaacs, Tom Hicks, David Rayson and George Shaw make you want to walk to see the actual places, just as Monet-worshippers go to Rouen or Van Goghers go vagabond in Arles. Again pop art comes to mind; the horribly familiar, seen afresh.
Things to see and do: Walk the city trail and locks walk along local canals, Chubb building, Molineux Stadium tour
Harwich, Essex
Mockba. Hoek. Warszawa. Berlin. Minsk. My one memory of Harwich relates to the boat train from Liverpool Street station in the mid-80s. Parkeston Quay didn’t sound like a song from Bowie’s Low album, but it was a portal to them. I arrived on the Hook-Harwich ferry after visits to Poland and Czechoslovakia but never used it to escape London to go east. But how I wanted to. I was obsessed with the writers Hašek, Kundera, Kafka, Miłosz – and the cold war frontier. I was at university in London and, passing through Liverpool Street in the early evening on my way home, I would glance enviously at the destinations before grumbling my way down to the tube.
In the lounge at the Pier hotel are vintage posters proclaiming “Harwich for the continent” and advertisements for holidays in Zeebrugge and Antwerp. In the era before car ferries and cheap flights, there were boats to Esbjerg, Gothenburg, Hamburg, Helsingborg, Hirtshals and Oslo. A century ago, ferries transported entire trains to Europe in true roll-on, roll-off fashion. Between 1924 and 1987, trains from the Hook linked it to Munich, Stockholm and, briefly, the Orient Express routes.
A heritage trail takes an hour but dazzles with epoch-making storylines and notable names; the Harwich Society offers free guided tours to individuals every Saturday between May and September. Sue Daish, the town council’s first female high steward and a trustee of the society, opens doors for me. We visit the High Lighthouse, Low Lighthouse (which houses a Maritime Museum), Treadwheel Crane and circular Redoubt Fort – built on a tump south of the centre in 1808 to repel Napoleon.
We linger upstairs in the jettied house of Mayflower captain Christopher Jones, and in a room in the town’s Guildhall once used to hold prisoners awaiting trial, daubed with elaborate carvings of ships, gallows and symbols to ward off evil spirits, dating from the late 18th century. One shows a ship flying the stars and stripes around the time of the American war of independence – possibly the earliest depiction of the US flag. I nostalgise at the Electric Palace cinema, built in 1911 and the oldest unaltered purpose-built cinema in Britain.
Harwich’s pubs are among the finest in England. Some 94 pubs have been named at 48 different sites. Our ancestors were sociable creatures, thirsty workers; home was not the high-walled castle it has become. Only about 10 remain and are lovely and look ancient but well used.
I’m not sure I have ever seen such a density of period architecture in so small an area. Heritage in cities exists in pockets, providing diversions from now. In the countryside, it might be a stately home or ruined abbey, with ice lollies and cream tea. Harwich Town, though, is haunted by its old, alluringly allusive places. Do they hold it back, or anchor it?
After dark, I stand and watch the ships load and unload at Felixstowe, and am thrilled when a horn sounds and one pushes away for Shanghai, Santos, Panama, Singapore, Hoek.
Things to see and do: Harwich Museum, seal watching at Hamford Water nature reserve, Maritime walking trail
Gateshead, Tyne and Wear
A circular bus route – uniquely relaxing – is a great way to recce a new town. The 51 and 52 (one route, two directions) is known as the East Gateshead Orbital. In just over an hour, I will be able to say I have been to all the places I can see on my map. There’s Felling and Deckham, Wrekenton, Low Fell, High Fell, Sheriff Hill, Leam Lane, and Windy Nook. There will be those who never made it to Sheriff Hill, for one reason or another. I can tell them about it.
On the top deck at the front, I get a rolling tour of social stratification and architectural styles – terraced rows, Tyneside flats (houses with two front doors, one for each flat), redbrick semis, older stone houses, prefabs. Front gardens are like family confessions, curiously moving seen from above. It’s been a welcome hot day in a non-starter summer, and the early evening is sultry. Neighbours lean on fences talking. Two children splash as much as possible in a paddling pool. A man prunes his privets. Someone sucks on a hookah on a driveway filled with family members. We stop a lot. Teens split from groups and get on the bus to go home. Only I ride all the way, the safely lost tourist, scanning the houses, looking for what – clues?
This is estate-land, laid out where slums were cleared. From the bus it’s confusingly, endearingly human. But look at a map and Gateshead contains the evolutionary history of street patterns, from the straight rows north of Saltwell Park to labyrinths of crescents and cul-de-sacs obeying the rubric of the garden suburb (with street names like Gorsehill, Harebell Road and Celandine Way) to council estate Lego-land – full of right angles and hard edges, rigged with zigzags, doglegs and quasi-communal areas.
JB Priestley, passing through, asked: “How is it that a town can contain one hundred and twenty-five thousand persons and yet look like a sprawling, swollen industrial village?” Being a Yorkshireman, he didn’t wait for a reply. “The answer is that this is a dormitory for the working class.” The most quoted lines in the Gateshead section of his English Journey are “the whole town appeared to have been carefully planned by an enemy of the human race”.
Commentators say Priestley was in a foul mood due to too much travelling, a nasty cold and medicines that left him feeling rough. But slagging off has long been the prerogative of the metropolitan travel writer – and insults stick.
Gateshead faces Newcastle across the Tyne, shares the bracing bridges, musical accent, fierce local identity. On the posts of the High Level Bridge are terse graffiti, sentences in a flicker book. One says “North East or Nowhere”. Newcastle looks civic and cluttered with churches and offices and a castle and the huge stadium on its summit. Gateshead is residential, suburban, a town with a centre like everyone else’s: the big Tesco, the bookies, boozers, transport interchange.
Roads and rail dominate, budging things out of their way: trains into and out of Newcastle use different lines. Fast, four-lane A-roads, including the A167 – laid out over the medieval Great North Road and still named “High Street” – have left gaping canyons flooded with toxins. But off the highways and under the ironwork there’s hope.
A new wine bar, a lovely old wedge-shaped pub, a horror-themed cafe. From Vane Gallery, housed in a long-dead pub called the Dun Cow on said High Street, art trickles up to grant-hogging showcase museums such as the Baltic. The ground floor has been hung for the town’s first Pride. “Gateshead is a place of potential,” says director Paul Stone, who co-founded Vane and its umbrella non-profit community organisation Orbis in 1997. “I’ve been through several cycles of funding and regeneration. I’m feeling optimistic. For the first time ever, we’re being listened to. Gateshead has challenges, but grassroots arts projects are the way to ensure its revival has longevity. Gateshead can be like Brooklyn.” But art is a strange world; “Probably more people know us outside Gateshead than in Gateshead,” he says.
Things to see and do: Prism Coffee; walk the Tyne Derwent Way; Dunston Staiths, Glasshouse International Centre for Music (ex-Sage); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Angel of the North
Armagh, County Armagh
Widow’s friend apples lie forgotten in flowerbeds outside a smart redbrick house at the top of Abbey Street. Bramleys are piled high outside a door for passersby to collect. Apple trees soften the aspects of the towering Roman Catholic cathedral and the capacious City hotel. I missed Armagh’s food festival by one day but I haven’t missed the harvest. I had no idea this was the centre of “orchard county”. Then again, I didn’t know the city is the mother-metropolis of Irish Catholicism and the Church of Ireland – Canterbury, Westminster and Liverpool all at once. Or that it’s a Celtic mythology vortex. And that it hosts a Georgian architecture festival every November.
Armagh has its own dedicated Troubles page on Wikipedia. Anyone who grew up between the 60s and 90s is familiar with the name from television news and bloody headlines. South Armagh in particular was portrayed as a Provisional IRA redoubt.
Would-be dark tourists might be disappointed. But Armagh does give up hints and secrets that point to the causes of its modern history. The underpinning Celtic sources are there in the name. Armagh alludes to the Ard Mhacha or the high place of the goddess Macha; outside town is a place known as Emain Macha – and by the anglicised name Navan Fort, though it was a ceremonial site rather than a fortress.
Celtic energies drew St Patrick in the fifth century. His founded a monastery that became a scholastic powerhouse. The Book of Armagh, less famous than Kells, is a priceless illuminated manuscript. It’s kept at Trinity College in Dublin. But Armagh remains the capital of the two churches. The Church of Ireland cathedral is thought to stand on a site chosen by Patrick. It’s been burned to the ground – by Vikings and lightning strikes – and rebuilt as many as 17 times over the long years, and is largely a 19th-century decorated gothic structure.
The cathedral is russet-coloured. Like an apple. Its nave is crooked, echoing Christ’s bowed head on the cross. The stained glass is beautiful. There’s a stone figure called the Tandragee Idol from the iron age and a weather-worn Celtic cross that once stood outside. I’m most drawn to the list of abbots, bishops and archbishops, which runs continuously from 444 (Patrick) to today. The names start off as Old Irish (Ailill, Carlaen, Nuadha), turn Norse (de Jorse, Fitzralph), become principally English (Kite, Lancaster) with the Reformation and plantation of Ulster, visit Rome (Spinelli de Palatio) dip some toes in Scotland (Stuart, Gregg, Armstrong) and then revert to Irish-born clerics, mainly (McCann, McDowell). Among them stands out the name of James Ussher – the prolific Dublin-born scholar who came up with the date of 22 October 4004BC for the creation.
Northern Ireland towns are loaded with history, heavy with claims about myth and memory. Outside its cathedral, Armagh offers a sequence of gorgeous green spaces: a monastic herb garden with dwarf box hedging; an orchard garden with bush fruit trees and espalier trees on the walls; a more formal parterre garden, and a contemplative garden, divided into “rooms” for contemplation and meditation.
The high king of Ireland, Brian Boru, was buried here in 1014 and a large bronze mask of his face made by Mayo sculptor Rory Breslin occupies a central position in the herb garden. His face is shown sliced up perhaps to show that light streams even through violent death.
Things to see and do: Palace Demesne and public park, Roman Catholic cathedral, Market Place theatre and arts centre
Wokingham, Berkshire
According to online house-seller Yopa, the average price for properties within a half-a-mile walk from a Waitrose store was £599,000 in comparison to £243,000 for homes that were within a 10- to 20-mile radius of a Waitrose.
Wokingham, the epitome of a home counties town, has a Waitrose at the heart of its centre, “a regular haunt for [former] Maidenhead MP and prime minister Theresa May”, a local newspaper reports. On Google Maps, its only rivals are a masonic centre, a shrink, a cinema, a wine store and something called Giggling Squid. I don’t know the mollusc, but I know Wokingham, as my partner was brought up there. We have used the town for the station, restaurants (Argentinian steak, posh Italian), barista coffee, and to source authentic Spanish deli produce such as padrón peppers and barquillos. The town does not stint on aspirational supplies. I wondered if the Spanish owner had Googled “place in UK where people can afford authentic Spanish deli produce”.
Framing the retail are solid redbrick buildings – a grand, churchy town hall, tidy and elegant houses on Shute End, gracious Grade I-listed almshouses – and a peppering of timber-framed Tudor properties. Wokingham’s origins are Saxon. The name probably means “Wocca’s place”, a tribal settlement. Before the Norman invasion, a chapel of ease was established in a clearing in the woods on the edge of Windsor Forest. The clearing became the town’s oldest street, Le Rothe Strete – today’s Rose Street. It was given a charter by Elizabeth I, became known for its bell foundry, brickmaking and the manufacture of silk stockings. Nine Mile Ride, connecting Bracknell to Finchampstead, was built around 1702 so that Queen Anne could observe the hunt from her carriage. Running parallel to a Roman road, it was expanded by George III, who loved to ride with hounds in the royal forest. Today, Nine Mile Ride is the B3430, just 6.7 miles long, and throbbing with traffic, but there are patches of woodland along its length. The smartest houses are on unmetalled streets. Thrushes and blackbirds contend with the snarl of SUVs and the whirr of EVs.
The road to becoming a commuter town was indirect. A line through Wokingham was first built to connect Reading with Redhill, on the Brighton line. It is a gorgeous North Downs journey. Later, a line from Wokingham to London Waterloo opened, then in 2022 the Elizabeth line reduced the journey time to Tottenham Court Road to around an hour. The texture and mood of a suburb derives a lot from the travelling time to work. Over an hour and a place can retain at least an attitude of countrification.
It’s a commonplace to call pleasant, safe towns that resist caricature dull or bland. Wokingham – which routinely tops admittedly unscientific surveys of happiest places to live, wealthiest streets rankings, best town in Berkshire … merits a visit because it partly answers the questions: What do British people want? What does affluence look like? What is English happiness? But all towns lie within a constellation of proximal forces and when I drew Wokingham’s on a map, it looked like a spidery new Zodiac sign. In near orbit are Ascot racecourse, Sandhurst, Wellington College, Farnborough airport, Broadmoor – and Waitrose’s head office.
Things to see: Finchampstead Ridges, Swinley Forest, Dinton Pastures country park
Chris Moss’s visits were assisted by Visit Essex, West Midlands Growth Company, NewcastleGateshead Initiative and Ireland.com
• This article was amended on 2 October 2024. An earlier version erroneously referred to Patrick Leigh Fermor having set off from Harwich for his walk across Europe, and the reference has been removed.
