By Kate Simon
Tis the season when the travel sections of newspapers and magazines announce their must-visit destinations for the coming year.
It’s usually a random mix led by the opening of a five-star hotel or the launch of a ££££ holiday package to a far-away place. Though a new museum, a significant anniversary, or the location of an upcoming movie will also be name-checked, and something more achievable, such as a UK Capital of Culture, will get an honourable mention.
Conde Nast Traveller has already declared. Its 2024 list includes Tahiti because the former French colony is hosting the surfing championships for the Paris Olympics (and you thought it was a schlep to Weymouth for the sailing for London 2012).
Botswana’s in because everyone’s going wild for three tents that have been pitched beneath a clump of wild ebony trees in the Okavango Delta. As is Saudia Arabia, where 16 hotels have sprung up on the Red Sea coast as tourism, like everything else, is put to work washing the country’s human rights record.
At British Beer Breaks, we take rather more humble inspiration from the 16 latest additions to Historic England’s National Heritage List.
England’s earliest modern-day car wash in Barkway, Hertfordshire, dating from 1600, sounds interesting to me. But I’ll admit more of you are likely to be tempted to make a trip to see the Sixties’ St Nicholas Church, pictured, in Fleetwood, Lancashire, which takes the shape of an upturned boat and has a spectacular interior. Historic England notes that it has “multiple trusses rising from the ground like the ribs of a ship”.
There are 400,000 listed sites around England, so you won’t go short of ideas – check out Historic Environment Scotland and Historic Wales, too. Historic England’s online map allows you to zoom in on anywhere in the country and discover what there is to see (it seems I could spend half a day wandering the streets around my house in Ipswich on an architectural tour).
And if you’re inspired to share a story or a photo about one of the places on the list, you can upload it to the charity’s Missing Pieces project, a growing collection of the public’s response to the different sites.
The other useful thing about the National Heritage List is that it will take you to parts of England you might not have previously considered. Doncaster gets a look in, for example, because of its stripy leisure centre, The Dome, once the largest building of its kind in Europe, built by the local council as an antidote to the demise of the coal industry.
Pack your swimmers for a splash about in its free-form pools, fountains and flumes, which are still operational. Who needs Tahiti…
Phil’s Beer Notes
Next door to Fleetwood you’ll find Cleveleys and the Shipwreck Brewhouse. Much more than a micropub, it’s also a café that opens for breakfast and a well-stocked bottle shop. On the bar there are five handpumps and eight keg taps, including its own-brand lager.
Doncaster Brewery Tap, in the centre of town, serves half a dozen cask ales, mostly brewed on site, and, in the Dystopia bar upstairs, 10 craft beers on keg plus many more in bottles and cans.
And if you do feel inclined to tour the 17th Century car wash, Baron Brewing is nearby. Describing itself as a “playground for beer”, its taproom opens most weekends, pouring an ever-changing variety of craft styles.
Photo ©Historic England Archive
London 2012 olympic sailing was even further away from London than you know.... Weymouth