Touring Britain
The Victorian Way
Episode 1 of 2
Duration: 59 minutes
Cultural historian David Heathcote uses his favourite old 1887 Baedeker Guide to explore modern-day Britain, discovering unexpected delights and hidden treasures which were popular with Victorian tourists but are rarely visited today.
Following in the footsteps of early American tourists who arrived off the boats in Liverpool, he takes the advice of the Guide and discovers 'the most fashionable of Welsh watering places'. The Guide then recommends a trip to the salt mines, popular with American visitors 100 years ago and, surprisingly, just as interesting today.
He then travels on to Manchester, recommended by Baedeker as a hotbed of music, politics and radical thinking and discovers that the spirit of what attracted the curious visitors 100 years ago lives on.
The journey ends in York where modern day tourists follow in the footsteps of their Victorian counterparts and enjoy the magnificent medieval city and cathedral.
As he travels, Heathcote explores the story behind the guide books that were so influential in creating the independent traveller as we know it today.
The Classic Motorist's Way
Episode 2 of 2
Duration: 59 minutes
Cultural historian David Heathcote uses two of the earliest Shell Guides to explore modern-day Britain.
The Guides are works of art in their own right and embrace the best of modernism and a love of the wild and unexplored. They used cutting edge art and photography and beautiful poetry and prose to entice the townies out to explore Britain in their newly-acquired automobiles.
The 1930s Shell Guide to Dorset was compiled by Paul Nash, one of the leading contemporary surreal war artists, while the Guide to Cornwall was edited by the young, ambitious poet John Betjeman, who took on the job to pay for his wedding expenses.
Heathcote's journey takes him through Dorset, exploring the wild and the ancient sites in Cerne Abbas and Badbury Rings. He also visits the seaside town of Swanage, which Nash disliked because of its grotesque over-development.
In Cornwall, Betjeman recommends that visitors should go to Tintagel in bad weather when the car park is empty, advice which Heathcote follows with spectacular results. The Guide takes him to quiet corners of Cornwall, old fishing villages and breathtakingly beautiful landscapes.
As he travels, Heathcote explores the themes of development which the Guides raise. Betjeman declared that traffic had spoilt everything by the 1960s, but Heathcote discovers a different, more optimistic view of the changes in Cornwall and he is still able to delight in many of the treasures that the Shell Guides recommended.
Replies
Thanks Rick.