The place vacationers seldom tread, half 20: three UK cities that really feel like house | England holidays

The final on this sequence of underexplored, ignored, bypassed cities revisits three locations loosely linked to someplace I’ve lived at completely different levels of my life. Relocating is grand-scale vacationing, as there are a number of months when the brand new place appears like a vacation vacation spot – contemporary, unusual, not filtered and tainted by behavior or prejudice. Going again years later is part-pilgrimage, part-funeral.

Harrow

The lexicon of suburbia – commuting, dormitory, cul-de-sac, privet hedge – resonates with not seeing. In densely peopled north-west London, you must dig – with eyes, books and boots – to search out the occluded previous.

In a 767 constitution, Harrow is Gumeninga hergae, the “heathen temple of the Gumeningas [tribe]”. The small hill – pronounced on outdated sketches – was a pure spot for practising worship; harrows are discovered throughout England. Later it was a part of the archbishop of Canterbury’s property and by Domesday had 70 ploughlands, 117 households and 102 villagers, two cottagers, three knights, two slaves and a priest – a sizeable place for 1086.

Bushes outnumbered folks. The medieval manor boasted a 100-hectare (250-acre) deer park in Pinner. The identify of Harrow Weald derives from the Outdated English for woodland, a reference to the Forest of Middlesex that after stretched from Houndsditch within the Metropolis of London, by way of Highgate and Mill Hill, to those outer reaches. It supplied pannage (autumn feeding) for 20,000 pigs.

In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Harrow attracted gentry, who might simply attain court docket and parliament by coach and 4. The rich landowner John Lyon based Harrow faculty by royal constitution in 1572.

On an 1868 map, Harrow on the Hill is a mere scattering of homes surrounded by parks, groves and faculty fields. The one close by railway line is the London and North Western, arrowing away to Birmingham and Crewe. In 1930, there was sufficient greenery and wildlife to encourage Harrovian Tom Harrisson (later concerned within the Mass-Remark venture) to publish Birds of the Harrow District.

Metro-land would, by the Nineteen Fifties, submerge the hill and its environs in housing, lasso it to London, spawn North, West and South Harrows and different subdistricts, and supply suburban dwelling for greater than 200,000 folks. A extra populous, much less deliberate model of this greeted me after I moved there in the summertime of 1987, to journey, as Betjeman places it, “Easily from Harrow” on the Metropolitan line “fasts” to a dreary workplace job in Blackfriars.

Figuring out, now, a bit about this misplaced city’s historic layers helps clarify the nonetheless tangible sacrificial really feel of the place, the amorphous sensation of inhabiting a populous nowhere.
Issues to see and do: walk part 9 of the Capital Ring; Gravestone Manor Museum; Zoroastrian Centre (former Ace Cinema).

Clitheroe

I like to recommend a gradual method to Clitheroe, to absorb the setting. A stroll into city permits time to admire the hill, the steep-sided lump on which sit the ruins of the Norman fortress, with the “second smallest surviving stone preserve in England”. From the highest of the hill, the views are uplifting: climate coming in from the west, the Bowland Fells, slivers of Yorkshire’s Three Peaks, Pendle Hill.

The A59 Lancs-Yorks trunk highway turned a bypass on the finish of the Nineteen Sixties. Earlier than then, vehicles and vans chugged up Moor Lane and alongside Citadel Avenue, which stay the traffic-cluttered sections of the excessive avenue. The narrowness and low-slung seventeenth– and 18th-century shopfronts remind me, in a method, of Totnes, which is essentially Tudor. There was a continuity to cities into the fashionable period, warped by redbrick Victorian pomp and eventually shattered by the Twentieth-century’s brutal raze-and-redevelop wave of purchasing precincts (lots of them since condemned).

In some respects, Clitheroe is archetypal Lancashire. The struggling one-time textile boomtowns to the south of Pendle Hill present what business did and offshoring took away. Clitheroe, comparatively talking, is undamaged. Outdated locations appear to climate booms and busts higher. New cash helps, in fact.

There have been factories right here, although. Two former spinning blocks, a weaving shed and workplaces have been given a creditable makeover to create Holmes Mill: a mixed deli-cum-bar, “luxurious” cinema, brewery and alehouse, resort and wedding ceremony venue, ticking aspirational containers for prosperous Lancastrians. Full of life native boozers are dotted throughout city, and Camra teams are most likely Clitheroe’s foremost excursionists. The New Inn is riotously cosy. Georgeonzola does cheese and wine. There are three cocktail bars, at the least. No clogs or caps there.

I stay a few miles exterior Clitheroe. It’s typically unusual to suppose it belongs to the identical county as St Helens and Warrington, the place I used to be born and raised. Locals say “Pennine Lancashire”. I’m from the Plains. The rain is worse right here, and the wind could be evil, however this north-facing city is a likable knot of streets and stonework; a lot to find, nonetheless.
Issues to see and do: Edisford Bridge (a swimming spot in summer time); stroll up Pendle Hill or on the Ribble Manner (supreme for winter); Whalley Abbey (by bus or practice); the No 11 bus to Bowland and for Pen-y-ghent.

Princetown

Devon is the least bleak county I do know. It has balmy summers, rolling pastures of pink earth and inexperienced grass, cove-serrated coasts, hamlets, excessive hedgerows and lengthy lanes, an ecclesiastical metropolis, a maritime metropolis, and gentle winters. Princetown is its sole flirtation with grim. Vacationers do come, and never as seldom as different spots on this sequence, however they typically look shocked once they get out of their vehicles or dismount their bikes.

The granite-grey Dartmoor jail is the dominant characteristic of Princetown, in addition to the township’s purpose for being. Thomas Tyrwhitt MP secured land from the Duchy property of the Prince of Wales to determine a “depot” for prisoners taken within the Napoleonic wars. It was distant sufficient to discourage escape and sufficiently inhospitable.

The primary prisoners arrived in 1809 and shortly Princetown jail was overcrowded. When US prisoners from the struggle of 1812 started arriving, circumstances deteriorated, and ailments akin to pneumonia, typhoid and smallpox turned “pure” dying sentences. The Depot closed when the conflicts ended, reopening in 1850 as a penal institution for “widespread criminals” – which included, over time, the longer term Irish premier Éamon de Valera, the conscientious objector and MP Frank Longden and Zen poet Reginald Horace Blyth.

Tyrwhitt – now Sir Thomas – constructed a railway to shift quarry stone right down to the port and convey up farm produce, coal, timber and lime for fertiliser. Prisoners and passengers used the road at numerous occasions till its closure in 1956. The jail was briefly closed in 2024, as a consequence of “increased than regular” ranges of radon, a cancer-causing fuel shaped by decaying uranium in rocks and soils.

The outdated railway is now a observe down which runners and cyclists hurtle away from Dartmoor’s anti-twee, anti-wild tenting, anti-tourism, probably radioactive city, or “village”, by inhabitants if not for its seems to be. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stayed on the Duchy resort, now the nationwide park customer centre. An escaped convict, Selden, has a pivotal position in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Between two farmhouses referred to as Excessive Tor and Foulmire and the nice jail “extends the desolate, lifeless moor. This, then is the stage upon which tragedy has performed, and upon which we might assist to play it once more.” For the fashionable, leisure-age gaze, the moor is a wild tenting backdrop and, at the least probably, stuffed with vitality, because of its ethereal solitudes; HMP Dartmoor in Princetown, emptied for now, is the tragic set.
Issues to see and do: Princetown to Burrator Reservoir mountain bike tracks; Dartmoor Jail Museum; Foggintor Quarry.

Chris Moss’s newest e-book, Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County That Made The Fashionable World, is printed by Outdated Avenue Publishing at £25. His e-book primarily based on this sequence, The place Vacationers Seldom Tread might be printed by Faber in 2026