It was a beautiful day in the north of England, and we had taken the train from Leeds to Knaresborough. My son was in his final year at university and I’d come up from London to see him. We found breakfast on a barge moored on the River Nidd and gazed at the grit stone arches of the town’s famous railway viaduct. After our coffee we strolled — how could we resist? — to Mother Shipton’s Cave, “England’s oldest tourist attraction”, which folks have been visiting since the 17th century.
Mother Shipton was a prophetess, they say, in Tudor times; said to have been born in a hollow by the side of the country’s only petrifying well — mineral-saturated water flows over a lip of the rock into a pool below. In the little gallery next door, you can see — wait for it — a handbag said to have belonged to Agatha Christie and a shoe left by Queen Mary in 1923, both objects turned to stone.
My son still teases me about my fond, not to say ecstatic, recollections of our visit to this peculiar spot. But the place is an idiosyncratic mix of real natural beauty — the well itself is truly lovely — and eccentric interest, a commitment to the strange and particular that will inspire if you allow it to.
Now’s the time to avoid the press of crowds and discover the unexpected. Sure, the familiar can be tempting, but our thronged cities feel like they’re reaching their limit. More and more, across Europe, protests are erupting against tourism, which can be a lifeline but also a curse. Amsterdam has even launched a campaign bluntly titled “Stay Away”; the city won’t be building any new hotels. From Paris to Venice, from Barcelona to Lisbon and beyond, local authorities are pushing back against short-term rentals, fearing their cities turning into amusement parks for tourists and pushing prices up far beyond the reach of locals.
Call me Pollyanna, but why not choose Leicestershire over Lisbon? Three museums in the county are this summer celebrating Ladybird Books — printed in Loughborough from 1915 to 1973 — and aren’t these little volumes, beloved by the ironic and the unironic alike, worth celebrating? (Choose The Farmer from the mid-20th century, or The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis from early in the 21st.)
There are hundreds of local museums and attractions within striking distance of wherever you may be, any one of which, I promise you, will offer a valuable reminder that interest, and indeed passion, can be found in the most unlikely places. They deserve your support, and you may find yourself astonished at what you find.
Let serendipity play its role. I’ll never forget the day when my father nearly slewed off a little B-road near Macclesfield, thanks to what was looming up in the sky before us. We were New Yorkers, tourists driving around this green and pleasant land; I was a nine-year-old in the back seat of my parents’ rental car. A spaceship, landed in the fields of Cheshire? Of course not: it was the great Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. In those days, the only visitors’ centre was a dingy Nissen hut: things are very different now. The site is unique, a home to cutting-edge science — the international headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array, a massive worldwide network of radio telescopes under construction — and a mecca of scientific and cultural heritage, its new £21mn First Light Pavilion offering a fascinating window into the groundbreaking work of the place.
Yet it’s still, somehow, off the beaten track, and a tribute to the vision of one man, Sir Bernard Lovell, often considered the “father” of radio telescope astronomy. The telescope remains the third-largest steerable dish in the world; in the 1950s, no one even thought it could be built. Lovell’s collaboration with an imaginative engineer called Charles Husband ensured that it is turned to the heavens to this day — as well as being, since 2019, a Unesco World Heritage Site.
In times of turmoil — and surely this is one of them — there’s much to be said for thinking about the particular, the specific, in the breaks between dwelling on the world’s problems. I honestly believe that anything is interesting if you pay enough attention to it, and especially if you meet those who are passionate about it.
I wrote a book about the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge; his family, the Roeblings, were instrumental in the development of wire rope — without which the modern world wouldn’t run. (No wire rope, no elevators, for a start.) I was interested in my subject, in the Brooklyn Bridge, but in wire rope? Honestly, not so much. That is, until I met the people whose true passion it was and got to stand inside a ropeworks watching steel wire pass through a gorgeous bath of shining zinc. You’ll forgive the pun: but I was galvanised.
It’s ironic, perhaps, to call the installation at Jodrell Bank “local”, because it’s a place that seeks to explore the deepest mysteries and wonders of the universe. But don’t all our passions do that, when considered in the fine grain?
I was on the Thomas Hardy Trail in Dorset a few years ago when I passed through Tolpuddle and stopped at the small but significant Martyrs Museum that commemorates the actions of George and James Loveless, James Hammett, James Brine, Thomas Standfield and Thomas’s son John, agricultural labourers who were transported to Australia in 1834 when they chose to protest over their meagre wages of six shillings a week. With its old-fashioned glass cases, printed banners hung from rods, scythes and pitchforks fixed to the walls, it’s a beau ideal of its kind: small, intimate, a little ragged round the edges, perhaps. But isn’t that just right? Whatever your politics, the place is a tribute to the power of collective and enduring energy.
You can find that offbeat energy in big cities, if that’s where you happen to find yourself. Why stand in those endless lines for the Sistine Chapel when you can take a bus towards the outskirts of Rome and end up at Centrale Montemartini — the city’s first electric power station, now converted into a museum of Rome’s heritage that looks like something from Doctor Who, the giant early 20th-century turbines framing statuary and artefacts. It’s a stunning, surprising recontextualisation of the eternal city and . . . shhh . . . . you’re likely to have it all to yourself.
Skip the Louvre when you’re in Paris and head to the city’s south-eastern edge where you’ll find Les Pavillions de Bercy, and the Musée des Arts Forains — yes, a whole museum devoted to French Belle Époque funfairs. This is a place to give the Mona Lisa something to smile about. Don’t join the crowds at South Street Seaport in Manhattan but head out to City Island in the Bronx and its perfectly adorable Nautical Museum. And if you’ve never been to City Island — I don’t know what you’ve been waiting for.
Trust me, try it. Go anywhere. What’s round the corner from you? The Derwent Pencil Museum? Did you know that Keswick, in the Lake District, was “home of the world’s first pencil”? I did not. The British Lawnmower Museum, in Southport, Merseyside, invites us to “enter the fascinating world of this internationally famous Museum” — and I am not going to argue with this boast. Where else could you see the lawnmowers of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, as our king was then, and one belonging to Coronation Street character Hilda Ogden, all under one roof?
I bet you think I’m poking fun, but I promise you, I’m not. Someone has gone to the trouble to care, to think about the past and how it relates to the future, to write labels, to wish for my company. Old Mother Shipton has been gone for half a thousand years yet is present in my heart. In a troubled world, that’s a summer’s gift, for sure.
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