Feb 11th, 2012 at 8:00AM:
Thanks to the London Olympics, which will open on July 27, and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, 2012 is expected to be a boom year for tourism in Great Britain. In the hopes of capitalizing on this trend, six historic cities have teamed up to get noticed by travelers intent on venturing beyond the English capital.
Bath, Carlisle, Chester, Oxford, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and York, Britain's ...Click on a label to read posts from that part of the world.
England posts
Britain's Heritage Cities are ready for visitors
Feb 11th, 2012 at 8:00AM:
Thanks to the London Olympics, which will open on July 27, and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, 2012 is expected to be a boom year for tourism in Great Britain. In the hopes of capitalizing on this trend, six historic cities have teamed up to get noticed by travelers intent on venturing beyond the English capital.
Bath, Carlisle, Chester, Oxford, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and York, Britain's ...Photo of the Day: Getting cozy in the snow
Feb 9th, 2012 at 6:00PM:
Most of our favorite travel memories are from summer: school's out and the days are long, you can hit the beach, sit in a park, or people-watch at a sidewalk cafe. Spring and fall are great shoulder seasons for lower prices and fewer crowds, but winter tends to be underappreciated for travel. Outside of visiting family for holidays, winter travelers generally head to the ski slopes or Caribbean ...London hotel offers champagne baths
Feb 9th, 2012 at 12:00PM: While drinking a 2002 Dom Pérignon, have you ever thought to yourself, "Damn, this stuff is so good, I should take a bath in it!" Well, you're not the only one with such luxurious fantasies. Starting Valentine's Day and running through the next year, the Cadogan Hotel in London will be offering a menu of champagne baths to guests who want to try out the ultimate bubbly bath.
What's your ...Luxury Travel: Visit England's Highclere Castle, filming location of Downton Abbey
Jan 23rd, 2012 at 4:00PM:
Fans of English history will leap at any chance to tour the country's stately homes - but a private one-on-one with a real-life Earl and Countess might just be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Of course, any such experience comes with a price. For GBP 7,900, guests can step into the shoes of a Downton Abbey cast member with a private day trip to Highclere Castle, the filming location for the ...Is the British pub an endangered species?
Jan 19th, 2012 at 4:00PM: The figures are in for 2011 and it's more bad news for the British pub. An average of 14 a week shut down, and Oxfordshire alone lost 35 this past year.
The pub is an institution. More than just a place to drink real ale, it's a place to see friends, get out of the house, do the pub quiz, and watch football.
My family and I spend every Easter and summer in Oxford, and while we aren't big ...Five overlooked attractions in London
Jan 16th, 2012 at 9:46AM:
London is full of great places to see. No matter what your interests are, this city has something for you. In fact it has so much there are some incredible attractions that are overlooked by the majority of visitors. Here are five you might want to visit.
Kew Bridge Steam Museum
The Kew Bridge Pumping Station, built in 1838, once supplied water and power to London through massive steam ...
London's Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art opens Alberto Burri retrospective
Jan 15th, 2012 at 1:00PM: The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is one of London's best small art museums. Housed in an elegant Georgian mansion on a quiet street in the London borough of Islington, it has the best collection of modern Italian art in the city and perhaps the nation.
Its latest exhibition is Alberto Burri: Form and Matter, a retrospective of one of the leading Italian figures in modern art. Burri ...The British Museum has great lineup for 2012
Jan 12th, 2012 at 4:00PM:
Travelers to London this year will want to stop by the British Museum. Not only is it one of the top museums in the world, with huge collections from the Classical, Egyptian, Medieval, and pretty much every other period, it also hosts several temporary exhibitions every year. As a regular visitor to London I always make sure to see as many of these exhibitions as I can.
The first is Hajj: ...Luxury Vacation Guide 2012: East London
Jan 10th, 2012 at 10:00AM:
London, a perennial tourist favorite, is no stranger to the luxury travel market. What's relatively new is the proliferation of luxury hotels and other venues in traditionally working-class East London.
In 2012, East London's reputation as luxury territory will intensify. Why? The Olympics, mostly. London hosts the Summer Olympics from July 27 through August 13. The Olympic Village along ...Four top treats from my 2011 travels
Dec 31st, 2011 at 11:00AM:
Since I've been a travel writer for three decades, people often ask me if I don't get tired of all the traveling and writing. After all, when you do anything for 30 years, it must get boring, right?
Wrong! I guess that's one of the gifts of this line of work. Every trip, every place, offers something new, even if I've been there a dozen times before. This year I took four big trips -- to ...Sandal Castle, Yorkshire, to host medieval battle on New Year's Eve
Dec 30th, 2011 at 3:00PM:
A castle in Yorkshire will be the scene of a reenactment of one of England's most important battles.
The Battle of Wakefield, fought on December 30, 1460, will be reenacted by the Frei Compagnie. Members of the group will not only be fighting it out medieval style, but will also be displaying medieval arts and crafts and talking about life in the 15th century.
Sandal Castle has an ...Chinese tourists chart a new European Grand Tour
Dec 24th, 2011 at 11:00AM: According to BBC Travel and the China Daily, approximately 70 million Chinese nationals traveled abroad in 2011, up from 10 million in 1999. A chunk of this new crop of Chinese tourists is traveling to Europe, but their itinerary veers a little off the trodden path.
BBC Travel outlined some of the historical highlights of the "new" European Grand Tour: cities like Trier, Germany, the birthplace ...Your Paintings website puts UK's art collections at your fingertips
Dec 23rd, 2011 at 1:00PM:
An online collection now boasts half of all the publicly owned oil paintings in the United Kingdom.
Your Paintings was started in June by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation and has already uploaded high-quality images of 104,000 oil paintings by 23,000 artists.
The goal is to put online all of the estimated 200,000 publicly owned paintings housed in some 3,000 institutions, making ...London day trip: Anglesey Abbey
Dec 20th, 2011 at 11:00AM:
London is one of the great cities of the world and you can spend weeks, even years, exploring it. Sometimes, though, it's good to get out. The towns and countryside near London make for fun day trips and one especially pleasant destination is Anglesey Abbey, six miles northeast of Cambridge.
The Abbey got its start in 1236 when Master Lawrence of St Nicholas sold 600 sheep to pay for the ...Stroll through the Field of Light at the Holburne this winter
Dec 7th, 2011 at 4:00PM: From now until January 8, 2012, the Holburne Museum in Bath, England, will feature renowned lighting artist Bruce Munro's "Field of Light" exhibit. The art installation features over 5,000 light bulbs planted around the venue that alternate and shift their appearance in groups. A magical effect is created by acrylic stems topped with frosted spheres that contain fiber optic cables illuminated by a ...Lincoln Cathedral quieter than usual as 176 year old bell gets repaired
Nov 28th, 2011 at 5:00PM: Great Tom, the giant bell at Lincoln Cathedral that has struck the hour every hour since 1835, has stopped ringing.
The clapper has almost shared off, a church official said. The last time the bell was silenced was during the filming of The Da Vinci Code in 2005.
Lincoln Cathedral is one of the great cathedrals of Europe. The original cathedral was commissioned by William the Conqueror and ...Early human ancestor on display at London's Natural History Museum
Nov 20th, 2011 at 10:30AM: The Natural History Museum in London has put an important fossil of one of our species' early ancestors on display.
Australopithecus sediba lived 1.98 million years ago in what is now South Africa. It's thought by some scientists to be a transition species between the more ape-like Australopithecines and the later, more human-like genus Homo. While it has the small brain size of the ...London's Temple of Mithras is moving back to its original location
Nov 18th, 2011 at 1:30PM:
London got its start as the Roman city of Londinium in the first century AD. Back then the so-called "mystery religions" were very popular in the Roman Empire. These cults, with their personal connections to the divine and secret rites, gave believers a more personal experience than the giant temples to Jupiter, Mars, and the rest of the standard pantheon. One of the most popular mystery ...National Gallery in London opens Da Vinci exhibition today
Nov 9th, 2011 at 2:00PM: London's National Gallery is hosting an exhibition of the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The show, titled Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, focuses on the paintings of the famous genius rather than his many other projects. It brings together nine of the only 15 or 16 paintings known to be his. The gallery boasts that it's the most complete collection of his paintings ever shown.
...MegaBus introduces sleeper bus overnight Glasgow-London
Oct 26th, 2011 at 12:00PM: Ever wanted to travel like a rock star? Now in the UK, you can travel on a sleeper bus between Scotland and England and pretend you're on tour. This week, while budget transportation company MegaBus announced new routes in the southern United States, with free tickets to celebrate), they also introduced a new sleeper bus service between Glasgow and London.
The 400-mile journey is a bit slower ...
