About Britain: A Journey of Seventy Years and 1,345 Miles

A charming new travelogue retracing the thirteen original routes of the 1951 Festival of Britain guides "About Britain"

About Britain is an entirely fresh approach to travel writing. In 1951, the Festival of Britain published a series of thirteen short guides that they dubbed 'handbooks for the explorer'. Their aim was to get people on 'the roads and the by-roads' to see Britain as a 'living country'. Armed with these guidebooks, Tim Cole takes to the roads again to find out what looks the same and what looks different from that moment when Britain's growing car-owning population set out in 1951. The result is a book that combines travelogue and reflections on our changing relationship with the car with a broader social, cultural and landscape history of post-war Britain.

The book is structured around the thirteen original itineraries, taking in all corners of the UK: from Oban to Caernarvon to Canterbury. Revisiting these places a lifetime (70 years) after the original 'sensible explorers' provides a chance to ask what has changed and what remains the same – what now grows in the hedgerows along our British roads and which industries dominate the towns along the way? Which places have fared better during the last century, and which have fared worse?

Sustainability, industry, travel, nature, motoring – all of these things are considered as we follow the Festival of Britain's original routes. The book also contains a Prologue, 'About Britain 1951-2021' and Epilogue, 'Heading Home', providing a delightfully written and wonderfully retro look at our own culture and heritage, packaged to recall the guides as they first appeared.