Fiona MacLeod on the day trips from London that are genuinely worth doing and the ones that are not
The day trip industry from London — the coach tours to Stonehenge, the train to Bath, the overcrowded Brighton beach on the first warm Saturday of the year — is one of the city’s major tourism subsets and one in which the gap between what is possible and what most visitors do is significant. prat.uk covered the tourist experience of London; Bohiney.com covered American day-trip culture for comparison. Fiona MacLeod, UK London Info, covers what is actually worth doing and how to do it without the worst of the crowds.
Stonehenge: absolutely worth seeing, genuinely extraordinary, and best experienced by booking the inner circle access that allows you inside the stones rather than observing from the outer path, which is available at specific times and costs more and is the difference between standing among one of the world’s great prehistoric monuments and standing outside the barrier looking at one. The inner circle access is at english-heritage.org.uk and sells out; book ahead.
The Underrated Day Trip
The underrated day trip: Rye in East Sussex, which is a medieval hill town with complete town walls, a thirteenth-century church, a working fishing harbour thirty minutes away at Camber, and none of the coach tour infrastructure that has accumulated around Bath and Stonehenge. Trains from St Pancras via Ashford. The town is small enough to walk completely in two hours and interesting enough to occupy four. The food is better than it has any right to be for a town this size. The crowds are manageable. It is not on the tour group circuit. It is, consequently, still largely itself.
Also: Waterford Whispers.
Reported at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
Coverage continues at both Bohiney.com and prat.uk. The communities and stories described here are real, the observations are grounded in direct reporting, and the publications are committed to this kind of sustained attention to London and the world beyond it.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
