The queen bee of England’s fun-by-the-sea-type resorts is unquestionably Blackpool. It’s unashamedly bold and brazen in its efforts to cement its position as the country’s second-most visited town after London. Tacky, trashy and, in recent years, a little bit tawdry, Blackpool doesn’t care because 16 million people don’t either.
The favourite county of residence for the soccerati millionaires of Manchester and Liverpool, largely agricultural Cheshire is a very black-and-white kind of place – if you focus on the genuine half-timbered Tudor farmhouses and the Friesian cows that graze in the fields around them. It’s a little bit of ye olde Englande, which is probably why so many footballers choose to live in the mansions and monstrosities behind the top-grade security gates: nothing gives the illusion of good taste like a bit of bling and tradition. For the rest of us, however, handsome, gentle Cheshire is mostly about Chester.
Marvellous Chester is one of English history’s greatest gifts to the contemporary visitor. Its red-sandstone wall giftwraps a tidy collection of Tudor and Victorian buildings originally built during Roman times when it was Castra Devana, the largest Roman fortress in Britain.
Mainlanders have long suspected the Isle of Man (Ellan Vannin in Manx) of being an odd place, full of weird island folk and their quirky ways. As ‘evidence’ they’ll point to the island’s reputation as a tax haven for wealthy Brits and its summer season of Tourist Trophy (TT) motorbike racing, which every May and June attracts around 50, 000 petrol heads. Hardly case closed.
Industrious, isolated Lancashire has a touch of everything, from mighty Manchester in the south to the Ribble Valley in the north, a gentle and beautiful warm-up for the Lake District beyond its northern border. Just north of the Ribble Valley is the handsome Georgian county town of Lancaster and, to the west, the ever-popular Blackpool, empress of the tacky, traditional English seaside resorts.
Lined with handsome Georgian buildings, Lancaster does a good job of representing Lancashire as its county seat and, for our purposes, as a decent stopover on the way to the Ribble Valley. Folks have done business here since Roman times, none more successfully than during the 18th century, when Lancaster was an important port in the slave trade.
Dogged, determined and for many decades down-at-heel, Liverpool just refused to go down. When unfancied Liverpool FC overcame a 3–0 half-time deficit to win the 2005 European Champions’ League final, it transcended the much narrower boundaries of football and was quickly adopted by this passionate, football-mad city as the latest – and most poetic – expression of Scouse defiance in the face of all the odds.
London has decided to give up the job of capital and go into quiet retirement. When everyone north of Leicester is done cheering, England looks around for a substitute and after some consideration the nation turns to… Sorry Birmingham, but it can be only Manchester, the uncrowned capital of the north and a city embracing change like few others in Europe.