[Map: zeroing in (maybe) on a vicinity for destination #1; you can skip the brief introduction and skip right to the details if you want.]
In the previous post about the trip, I covered the first-cut list of “we need to visit here” cities. That list was vaguely organized chronologically, top to bottom (not counting the USA cities at the end), but we hadn’t given really serious thought to much beyond the names of the cities themselves.
The current “official” list includes about a half-dozen more cities (with — yes — a few more thrown in even later). It’s also better organized to suggest, y’know, first we’ll go here, then we’ll go there, and so on.
I tinkered with the sequence quite a bit, and even started to drill down to consider how we might go from place to place. But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized in the process a waste of time and energy: we plan, you see, to plan almost no specific details along the way. We don’t know how long we’re going to stay at place X (or whether indeed we’ll stay there at all, vs. just blow through for a brief visit). We consquently can’t make lodging arrangements much in advance, book transit in advance, purchase event tickets in advance…
…except: we need a place and a time to start. That’s the focus of the rest of this post.
We’ve always taken it for granted that we’ll start in “England,” by which we mean not just that country but also Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland proper. It’s the one place in Europe which we’ve visited, and that for only a measly week, and so it’s the one place we know we need to see more of and what (more or less specifically) we want to see and experience while there.
But our ignorance — well, let’s say our naivete — hinders us. On that previous trip, we stayed in two locales: the town of Ludlow (in the northwest) and in London itself. For years, we’ve read and heard the names of English counties — all those -shires, don’t you know — but have almost no concept of where they lie, geographically. (Exceptions of course for those with compass points in their names — Northumberland, “Wessex,” etc.) Where to start narrowing down, then…?
Our general criteria:
- We want to spend at least a couple weeks just in the London area.
- We want to stay on the north side of London, to facilitate visits to areas of interest up there without having to pull up stakes and relocate for real.
- We prefer places with easy mass-transit travel to as many other places as possible — i.e., places not requiring us to drive.
- We like the idea of genuinely staying someplace: a place with easy access to cultural and other landmarks in the city and elsewhere, of course, but also (for lack of a better word) livable in its own right — a place with lots to explore (and be comfortable with) for days at a time.
Then The Missus came across a recent (April, 2019) list of “50 best places to live near London.”
Granted, this list comes from the glossy periodical Country Life, self-described as “the Quintessential British Country Magazine.” Wikipedia:
The magazine covers the pleasures and joys of rural life. It is primarily concerned with rural communities and their environments as well as the concerns of country dwellers and landowners and has a diverse readership which, although mainly UK based is also international. Much of its success has historically been built on its coverage of country house architecture and gardening at a time when the architectural press largely ignored this building type.
So, perhaps a bit, er, snooty? Or let’s say “exclusive.” (I can’t honestly judge, though, never having seen let alone handled an issue.)
But the Country Life list was a place to start. It’s even divided into two separate, not-quite-overlapping lists: best places to live, and best places for commuters to London to live — even better!
(Without boring you with all the details — the usual “build a spreadsheet with a couple dozen columns [blah-blah-blah]” stuff — I’ll just direct your attention to the map at the top of this post. (Or, if you prefer, you can just open a larger version in a separate browser tab/window here. If you’re feeling really adventurous or in more need of control of things, visit the Google Map itself.)
Taken altogether, the map is a zoomed-in Google Maps view of the area surrounding London (that’s the star at the center: roughly, Trafalgar Square). The two jagged-circle areas centered on London mark (approximately) 25 miles straight-line distance from the star, and 50 miles. You can also see a “pushpin” for every place in the Country Life list, and the pushpins are sort of color-coded:- Yellow: the town is on both the “best places to live” and the “best places for commuters” lists.
- Blue: the town is on the “best places to live” list, but not the “best places for commuters” one. (There only a few of these.)
- Orange: the town is on both lists, and on the desirable (to us) north side, but outside about a 25-mile distance from the city.
(Note: one yellow pushpin lies outside the 50-mile circle; it’s the village of Dunchurch, which lies about 80 miles north-northwest of London. Country Life says it’s within an hour’s train ride of London, but I find this hard to believe unless they just mean “an hour’s ride to the outermost fringes.” Dunchurch might not be a bad place to relocate to, though, as a central point for exploring more northerly locales once we move on from London.)
The line isn’t perfectly horizontal, and doesn’t cross through Trafalgar Square — I couldn’t make it so with the limited Google Maps tools — but it denotes the north-south midpoint of the area under consideration.
A bit of careful counting will tell you that five yellow pushpins on the north side of London lie within 25 miles’ distance of the city’s center; the second-choice orange pushpins (north of London, but outside the 25 miles) number fourteen.
Translation: we still don’t know where we’ll start, but we feel a heck of a lot closer to knowing it!
Froog says
Hmm, you know ‘Wessex’ doesn’t really exist, right? Not since Anglo-Saxon times anyway. Thomas Hardy took the name for a fictional region in which he set most of his novels – an area that basically corresponds to what we call ‘The West Country’ (Dorset, Somerset, and Devon; maybe a bit of Wiltshire and Hampshire too – but not extending all the way west into far Devon and Cornwall).
And I can’t see why you’d stay outside London, if you want to visit a lot of places in London. The only convenient way to visit places outside of London is by train (or perhaps coach), and all the stations are in central London; so, even for access beyond the city, you probably still want to be staying fairly close to the centre of the city.
The Tube is a bit antiquated for the most part, and has quite close spacing of stations, especially in the more central areas; hence, it’s not all that fast.
I wouldn’t really consider staying any further ‘north’ than somewhere like Highbury, Camden, or Hampstead (which are quite ‘villagey’ in London terms; especially the latter); but even from there, it’s going to take you a good 30 or 40 minutes by bus or Tube to get anywhere central. And that’s not the kind of journey you want to be making multiple times a day when you’re on holiday.
Also, the high-tone rural areas around London (for many years non-affectionately dubbed “the stockbroker belt”) are probably not going to be any cheaper than central London; AirBnB type places are probably going to cost you an arm and a leg. I hope you are handsomely cashed up for your big expedition, because that first week or two will hit the budget hard.
I’m sure Edinburgh is on your list somewhere, but I think I read that you were thinking of moving on to the Continent in August. I would very highly recommend factoring in as much of a stay as you can in Edinburgh in early or mid-August – while the Festivals are going on.
The main Arts Festival runs two or three weeks through the middle of the month, but ‘The Fringe’ is now much larger (and more fun!): lots of comedy and other kinds of theatrical performance, lots of world theatre, cabaret, am-dram by school and college groups – you name it. That goes pretty much the whole month, and the ‘preview week’ is usually right around the beginning of the month. There’s a small jazz & blues festival that’s usually just before that (although the Jazz Bar, a characterful cellar joint at the bottom of Chambers Street, is always a good place to visit at any time). The small Film Festival, I think, is more usually towards the end of the month; the Book Festival some time in the middle.
I am hoping to make it up there again myself this year (first time in three years: everyone will have forgotten me!)….
Good luck with it all. It’s a very enviable adventure!
John says
Thanks for catching the “Wessex” slip! I fixed it in the simplest way possible — amazing what merely adding quotation marks and a reference link will do for a gaffe.
We actually have in the last week started to look at in-town places for the initial London(ish) stay. Cash is of course an issue (we’ll be among the so-called “fixed-income” class by then), but as long as we’re staying no more than about three weeks it will probably be all right. (Also factor in that we’ll be in the “this is our only chance to do X” — whatever X is — frame of mind for the trip. So we’re by design loosening the purse strings a bit.)
We’ve been poking around with Airbnb, VRBO, Homeaway, and such, and even if we don’t stint on the amenities it’s not difficult to find multiple alternatives which we can afford within a fairly small circle in decent areas of town (or in the “stockbroker belt,” and thanks for the term!). I haven’t shared here the columns of my spreadsheet which show average train-travel time from each of the outer areas, but we’ll be comfortable with a 30-to-60 minutes’ ride.
I think the main reasons we’re looking outside London proper are:
Edinburgh is absolutely on our list, you bet! But the calendar is our enemy as far as when we can visit each general area, especially given our “about six months” timeframe for the (not even close to) entirety of Europe. We’re just too poorly traveled — it all will be effectively new to us, every single day — so we’re trying not to lose our heads about missing otherwise must-see experiences like the Edinburgh festivals, the Eisteddfod in Wales, and so on. Aaaand we’ve also mapped out the itinerary through the calendar in such a way so that as we proceed from region to region, we can have more or less just a single wardrobe for the duration suitable to the climate in each region, each month. (We’re expecting to have to supplement it as circumstances demand — just trying to avoid the really obvious “pack in advance for any destination at any time” traps.)
Thank you sooo much for your input so far; I was rather hoping for your insights (although I didn’t want to assume them of course!) — you have not at all disappointed me!
Froog says
Your itinerary’s probably getting a bit overstuffed already, but… if you do find you could squeeze in a day or two somewhere en route between Edinburgh and wherever you’re coming from/going to, I am very fond of Berwick-upon-Tweed, a rugged – rather than cutesy – little seaside town right on the border. I’d often noticed from the window of the train how charming it looked, and finally got around to giving it a closer look a few years ago. Some great walking around there in the countryside, or along the coast (Lindisfarne, one of those islands (one of those islands that’s not quite an island twice a day) is not far away to the south.
John says
Until reading your comment yesterday I’d never even heard of Berwick-upon-Tweed; thank you — it sounds lovely, from your own capsule description and from the other material I’ve seen around the Web!
We’re so looking forward to our extended time in the Isles this year, and we’re consequently — selfishly — so worried about the effects of the Brexit tumult, whatever those effects might be and whatever the actual outcome. The crystal ball keeps coughing up wildly different scenarios of what might and might not be doable, and even what and might not be worth doing…