English Wanderings

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There is More to This Country. . .

Where I come from it takes a good hour and a half driving in excess of the speed limit before you even come to the next piddling little village down the road, and to get to the next “big” place takes another hour or so. Australia is the kind of place where you can drive for several hours on end and only find two places that are signposted enough to be considered worth stopping at. This is the world that I grew up in; this is what I’m used to. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that here in England I can get on a train and within two hours have passed through three completely different cities worthy of independent write-ups in a guidebook, have nearly cross the country from east to west, and have not managed to notice a single view devoid of houses.

I discovered the ridiculously small scale of England one afternoon when, at a whim, I decided to go completely out of character and take an entirely unplanned overnight trip just so that I could attend an all night rave party in a city I’d barely heard of before. Once I’d started it was hard to stop myself and all of a sudden I was to be found aimlessly wandering around England trying to find exactly where London finished and the “countryside” began. I’m pretty sure I found that point in the Scottish highlands when I finally managed to not see a house.

I Led a Privileged University Life

Bristol is a city just inland from the west coast of England, tucked in between the bulges of Wales and Cornwall (know herein as Pasty-town as that is my only experience with it, oh and the Pirates of Penzance I guess). My reason for visiting was simple, Katie and Sophie of Xishuangbanna fame (Happy New Year, Dai Style) were meeting there after their university semesters had finished for a few days frivolity before heading home to their parents. I figured that I could catch up with them and have a bit of English-style fun while I was at it, I wasn’t sure what they had in mind though.

Rather suddenly I discovered the inordinate prices of English railway tickets (don’t even ask) and almost as suddenly I found myself at the station in Bristol. I’m serious guys, if they’re going to be different cities then they have to be a little further apart, I was in danger of sleeping through the entire train ride as well as its return to London. That was when I discovered the plans: we were going to hang out and eat dinner at Sophie’s uni dorm before heading out to a closing down party at the city’s biggest and flashiest club.

Now, when I went to university (all that year ago) life was pretty sweet. There wasn’t really that much work to be done during most of the semester so a lot of time was spent enjoying life. Rather conversely, the lifestyle of a typical medical student in Bristol seems to be somewhere between that of a homeless person and a lunatic. That is of course assuming that Sophie is your average student, which she clearly isn’t. I don’t know too many people that consider a slice of white bread to be a sufficient dinner, but Sophie does. However, she put out her best hospitality for Katie and me so we each got to use one of her precious stolen jam sachets while Sophie went without. The flip side is that no expense is spared on alcohol by Sophie and her friends so out came the cheapest bottle of barely legal moonshine on the market. Oh what a lifestyle.

The focus of the night was obviously the rave party which, I have to admit, doesn’t constitute my scene in any way. I figured that I could tough my way through it as getting to see Katie and Sophie after such a long time was going to be fun enough, but clubs aren’t as much fun when there isn’t a rich Chinese business man buying all of your drinks.

The Most Interesting Thing in Bath is Not the Roman Baths

I ran away from Bristol rather quickly, the prospect of another night in a dingy student bar didn’t seem all that interesting. I’m still not sure about the legality of taking three train rides off a single return ticket, but I’ve been assured that I wasn’t doing anything wrong and that night I managed to end up in Bath.

Now, Bath is not just another English town; it is home to the famous Roman Baths built millennia ago by the conquering forces which nowadays are the focus of one of England’s biggest tourist markets. Busloads of day trippers come direct from Stonehenge to wander aimlessly around the town before heading off again and leaving the town relatively quiet in the evenings. I, on the other hand, was staying upstairs of an old pub somewhere in the middle of Bath and found it to be quite a wonderful little place.

Like any good tourist I first headed for the Roman Baths, hoping that perhaps there I could get a proper shower at least (the quality of English hostels is shockingly low; although I have stayed in places that were equally bad in Asia, I didn’t have to pay twenty euros for the privilege over there), and maybe I could also soak in a little bit of the old civilisation that once ruled most of Europe. However, the baths are no longer a place for bathing, and looking at the water there I didn’t even feel like dipping my toes. Furthermore, the baths themselves weren’t really that impressive as all the original finery has long since vanished and all you can see today are contemporary additions and slightly rectangular holes in the ground. There were some interesting exhibits from underground excavations, a stone here, statuette there, and some nice mosaics, but on the whole I found the place to be rather sterile. I had more fun listening to Bill Bryson waffle on about scary faces and roman behaviour on the audio guide than actually looking at things.

And, for the record, there is a modern spa on the premises for those who wish to say they had a bath in Bath.

Leaving the baths behind, I set out to find some lunch and ended up wandering the streets of the town for a good few hours, looking here and there, and just generally enjoying what was the first properly sunny day of the year. For some reason, all of Bath was built at roughly the same time, all that you can see today that is, and all of the buildings are of one distinct style. This somehow gives the city character as row after row of beautiful yellow stone houses runs off in front of you. Over the slowly rising hill which forms the main part of town there are literally thousands of beautiful old homes, the sort of place you’d expect 18th century rich people to be found were they immortal, all of them joined together perfectly into rows that put any modern housing estate to shame. Better yet, trees and greenery, big gardens and flower beds, are dotted around the houses so that Bath looks less like a city and more like a country town. Also, there are a number of grandiose churches in the area, including the magnificent Bath Cathedral, which add even more to the city’s charms.

I wandered about the pretty town for most of the day, finally ending up in the botanical gardens (which are near to the Royal Crescent; the most spectacular group of houses) which in themselves were an almost too good to be true scene. Perhaps it was that the warm sunny weather was such a welcome change from overcast skies and cold winds that I would have found anywhere a pretty place, but I think that Bath would hold its charm in any conditions.

Buxted, Brighton and the South Downs

South of London, somewhere between two towns I’d never heard of, Uckfield and Heathfield, there is a small town called Buxted and this is where I headed to next. Not because I wanted to see Buxted of course, that would be too obvious, I was instead heading to a small house which is somewhere between all three of them, and near some other weirdly named places like Blackboys and Framfield (they really know how to come up with good town names round here). My friend Ben (crazy man I met in Beijing) was living there at the time, and he’d promised to show me round the South Downs which are supposed to be a beautiful retreat between London and the channel. I managed to get myself to Buxted without any worries, thanks to the brilliant if expensive train system in England, and that’s where things fell down.

I arrived at the station and walked out into the centre of town which I figured was roughly between the church and the store, which also happened to be the edge of the town. There I found a telephone and rang Ben’s mobile but he didn’t answer, over and over again, until after an hour of waiting in the cold without any luck at getting in touch with him I’d actually run out of small change to use in the phone. I sat down with the prospect that I could be there for a very long time. Eventually I found a phonebook and looked for his home number, but he didn’t have one, and I asked a postman if she knew where he lived, but she assured me that it was too far to walk. Finally it got to the stage that the shop was closing so I didn’t even have anywhere to sit except on the street! Things were getting just a little bit desperate, I really had no idea what I could do.

And then, just as I was considering catching the train back to London, Ben turned up. He assured me that his phone simply didn’t have reception unless he kept it in exactly the right spot on a certain windowsill in his house, where it clearly hadn’t been all afternoon. And he’d been expecting me and everything!

Anyway, as all things do, everything turned out alright and soon I was being taken on a grand tour of a 600 year old country house. I always thought that an old house was built around 1900, anything older than that had either fallen apart or been converted into a museum of some description, for that’s what happens in Australia. However, Ben’s parents had just bought themselves a rather standard home in the countryside which had been built four hundred years before my country was even colonised. From the outside it’s a little hard to tell its age, it looks old but not ancient, but once inside there are little clues that belie the house’s story. The doorway which was no longer rectangular and barely came up to my shoulders was a good clue, and the fact that I had to duck more and more the further I walked inside was also a tip off. It was just like those fake houses you sometimes see at carnivals, the ones where the roof and floor come together towards the back so as to distort your perspective. Thankfully most of the house was being renovated so the liveable areas were restricted to the parts with normal roofs and doors (although still only five and a half feet tall) and it is actually a rather nice little place.

Outside the back door I could see the English countryside, which prompted me to finally realise where they got the name for the New England area in Australia. Ben’s small garden (with its two lakes, and a full cricket pitch worth of grass) is at the top of a small hill so across the rolling fields I could see small patches of trees, the occasional farmhouse, and the green grass filling every patch of ground. It was just the way I had imagined the English countryside to be.

To pass our time in the country we did a few things, such as walking along a public path which wandered through fields and forests, visiting the local pub for lunch, and generally enjoying the peace and quiet, but mostly we tried to collect as many different types of beer as we could. The English people really do love their Ales, so we set out to see just how many breweries and brews were available. At the local supermarket we managed to find about 40 varieties, and most of them were all relatively local. If you tried to taste every beer in England you’d probably need a good ten years to do it. After a subsequent visit to Ben’s house (three weeks later) we’d managed to increase the collection to more than sixty without having ventured more than twenty kilometres and after only visiting a single brewery. To put it simply, there are too many beers in England for them all to actually taste unique.

On my second day in Buxted we had access to a car so we drove south to the downs which are a row hills running parallel to the coast. From the English Channel the Downs rise slowly to until abruptly they disappear and a great flat valley spreads northwards towards London. It was to this northern extremity of the Downs that we headed, after passing through some quaint backstreets, country lanes and the pretty town of Lewes. We parked the car beside one pub and started climbing to the top of the hills where there was a second pub (do you see how well England is planned? You can organise everything in terms of pubs).

Unfortunately the weather turned foul and strong winds were blowing rain and hail towards us from the channel, yet the view from atop the Downs was still amazing. If you were to ask anyone in the world to sketch the English countryside without them every having seen it then they would come up with a picture of the view from the South Downs. I find it hard to describe but it was like I’d been there before as I looked down on the quiet, cold and damp greenery spreading in every direction with the trees sporadically broken by fields, cricket pitches, ancient houses, small cars, and more pubs than people.

We stopped in the pub on top while the weather cleared (it didn’t) and then quickly headed back to the car and stopped in the pub there while the weather cleared (it didn’t) before we finally drove to the coast and Brighton.

I imagine that Brighton is a nice city, what with its Indian inspired Royal Pavilion, beachside carnival pier, not-the-worst-in-the-world beach, and tightly packed alleys of old buildings and kitschy stores. However, given the horrible weather which had blown in we weren’t able to properly enjoy it all at the time. I did get a good feeling when I saw the English Channel for the first time though, just another place that I’ve always wanted to see added to the list.

Royal Tunbridge Wells

Next up I headed east to meet two old friends of mine in Tunbridge Wells, a nice commuter town which manages that wonderful feat of being full of people who don’t mind spending three hours riding trains every day. Just like Bath, most of Tunbridge Wells is built in a standard style typical to the rich people from a few centuries ago because it became a famous resort town (the royal family liked the place enough to give it the official name of Royal Tunbridge Wells which is apparently something good).

The town sits in a nice valley just like the rest of southern England. It’s completely surrounded by green grassy countryside and it’s easy to escape into peaceful places, which is the main drawcard of living there. My friend David showed me around the town and we sat down in the park overlooking the town while we ate our lunch (to save money I reduced my lunch to packaged sandwiches from supermarkets for my entire stay in England, and even then they were expensive), looking down on all the old houses and shops.

That afternoon was special and David was going out with his mates for a true English pub crawl and I was dragged, kicking and screaming, along. We started in the old part of the town, where the small streets couldn’t fit cars and all the nice restaurants and bars can be found. Now, with so many pubs around, over 50 of them, I figured that we’d be moving around a lot and seeing most of the town, however, a pub crawl here is more like a gradual stroll between three or four nice places including a restaurant for dinner. It was essentially just a really good night out. We spent our time playing games in pubs (bar billiards was new to me and, frankly, it is a silly sport), drinking new beers (pulled from proper taps in old pubs, oh that is the proper way to enjoy beer), and generally being boys.

Manchester

Eventually I had to start being a proper tourist again, so I decided to head northwards from London (after meeting up with some more Beijing friends, visiting Greenwich and doing various other London based things) so I hopped on a bus north to Manchester.

Manchester is a really compact city, at least in the center, and it’s a whole lot of fun to walk around looking at all the grungy old warehouses which stand next to older churches and a positively ancient government building which somehow has a skybridge. I was wandering around enjoying all the old places, all the weird sculptures (Abraham Lincoln is here hidden down a side road between two old churches, make sense of that one), all the nice squares, the relatively peaceful nature of the place, looking at the old cathedral, and then I turned around and saw a gigantic, brand new ferris wheel bigger than anything I’d ever seen before. Talk about out of place. Literally right next door to a five hundred year old pub there is a white space-ship inspired ferris wheel, it’s a weird sight.

I spent two days in Manchester, just a short stop on my way north, and most of my time was spent in the gigantic Museum of Science and Industry which displays all kinds of random things from the Industrial Revolution including about 20 working steam engines (well worth checking out). Plus, just for me they finally put on the Bodies exhibition in a city that I was in (I’ve seen it in about five cities around the world but it always closes just before I get there or opens just after I leave, finally in Manchester I got to see it).

Spanish Lessons in Huddersfield and Chinese Lessons in Leeds

My final port of call in England was Huddersfield, the biggest town in Europe. Not that Huddersfield is big, but to be a city in Europe you need either a university or a cathedral so Huddersfield won’t count no matter how big it actually gets. I was heading there specifically to see another old friend of mine, Gary, who I met in Asia a few years ago.

After arriving and being shown around the town a little bit we headed to Gary’s house which has one of the best views I’ve seen anywhere in the country; looking out over yet another scene of rolling English countryside, it really is all the same over here. From there we ditched the work car and went cruising the country in a vintage Porsche 911 on the way to Gary’s parent’s house where his vintage MGB was garaged. Oh how the life of a poor traveller is so terribly difficult.

While catching up with Gary I sampled the lifestyle of northern England; initially that means another couple of pubs but this time we also sampled traditional English food: a fantastic curry at 3am, and Argentinian steak. That makes sense doesn’t it? For some reason there is a restaurant run by Argentinians which is staffed by Columbians, Mexicans, Bolivians, and Argentinians in the small town of Huddersfield in the middle of northern England. I couldn’t think of a less likely place to find such an authentic place, it was marvellous. Anyway, first the first time in a long time I enjoyed a real steak cooked well enough to put all English food to shame (for English food is nothing special, except when the Polish staff with their thick accents yell “we need more Yorkshire pudding”, that is always very funny), and to make it even better still we added some good wine and chatted up the Columbian waitresses in Spanish (Gary speaks Spanish very well, and he told me a few good things to say).

Before saying goodbye to Gary we headed slightly further east to Leeds where there is a nice and authentic (close) China town so I repaid Gary the favour by ordering our lunch and chatting up the waitress in Chinese. It may seem to you that most of my experiences from rural England revolved around food and beer, well that’s true.

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Photos

Bath Cathedral
Impressive enough from the outside, but just wait till you see the interior!

The Streets of Bath
Yellow sandstone and not much else.

The Path Back to Town
Spring is on its way.

The Roman Baths
Fancy a swim?

View From Downstairs
This is where the thermal spring emerges from the earth.

Just A Normal Street
In Bath even the most mundane and ordinary road looks antique.

Every Lane in Bath Looks Just Like This
The whole city is beautiful, it's rather unbelievable.

Oldest House in Bath
And it looks as good as new, well, close.

The Most Authentic Roman Antique in Town
Compared to what remains of the baths this guy was pretty well the best Roman attraction in town.

My Street
I was staying above a pub on this street. I couldn't ask for much more than that could I?

Finally, Spring!
The first proper flower sighting of the year!

The Royal Circle
Imagine having this as your front yard! Well, above 30 familys in Bath do.

Comments

[Annika]

Did you know that Jane Austen hated Bath? Thought I would add that to your rhapsodizing about it.

[drbexl]

Great Entry
Ah, you had me laughing all the way through. I rarely read other entries, but as you were on the front page and I'd been nearly everywhere you've been in England, thought it was hilarious to see it from a non-Brit's perspective - you should turn this into a magazine article!!

[Tiffany Jean]

OMG Matty, I've been following your travels since.... Cambodia and vietnam. How are you still travelling??!!? When do you finish???