Route Britannia, the Journey South: A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain Read online

  Route Britannia

  A Spontaneous Bicycle Ride through Every County in Britain

  Part 1: The Journey South

  by Steven Primrose-Smith

  First published in 2016 by Rosebery Publications

  Copyright © Steven Primrose-Smith, 2016

  All rights reserved.

  [email protected]

  Names have been changed where appropriate.

  A map of the ride can be found at www.RouteBritannia.com.

  Table of Contents

  Author's Note

  Chapter 1: The route to Britannia

  Chapter 2: Lizzie is a scratter

  Chapter 3: A nurse with a verse

  Chapter 4: Cannibals, Satanists and a piglet or three

  Chapter 5: The Pass of Lost Existence

  Chapter 6: Crashing the time machine

  Chapter 7: The sanctuary of dead elephants

  Chapter 8: Gnomes, fairies and wizards

  Chapter 9: Down in the Downs

  Chapter 10: The campsite of broken hearts

  Chapter 11: Fleas and fleeing

  Appendix: My gear

  Also from Steven Primrose-Smith

  Author's Note

  I didn't intended this to be a book in two parts. I figured it would easily fit into one. After all, my trip around Europe, the one that spanned roughly seventeen months in total, fit compactly into the 350 pages of No Place Like Home, Thank God, and my British tour was only a five-month project.

  But on this ride I was entering somewhere new on a near-daily basis and to distil this book to a single volume would have meant omitting entire counties, and that wasn't what this book was supposed to be about. I wanted it to be about the whole of Britain, every piece of it.

  This book, The Journey South and the second part, The Journey North are, in a way, badly named. There are “northern” counties in the second volume that are farther south than some of the “southern” counties in the first, but I decided to slice the story in two at roughly the halfway point. Ideally I would have drawn a line from Liverpool to Hull and made it properly North and South, but then the books would have been of unequal lengths. Besides, the date chosen for the end of the first book is quite an important one.

  Once again, because the technical details of my bike and what I carried with me are only of interest to die-hard gearheads I've included this information as a separate appendix at the back of the book.

  I hope you enjoy Route Britannia. If you do, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could pop on over to Amazon and give it a review to tell others about it. If you hated it then, er, please forget we even had this little chat.

  Chapter 1: The route to Britannia

  Ah, Britain. What does it mean to you? I suspect that depends on whether or not you're from Britain yourself and, if so, from which part. Some people's view of Britain is less than positive. The writer Hanif Kureishi described it as “a squalid, uncomfortable, ugly place...an intolerant, racist, homophobic, narrow-minded, authoritarian rathole run by vicious, suburban-minded, materialistic philistines”. And the Queen gave him a CBE!

  As I came to the end of my all-Europe bicycle ride a few years ago (No Place Like Home, Thank God) I met an Australian in a pub, the Aussie's natural habitat.

  “England's weird, mate,” he said. “The first thing the English always tell me is how shitty the place is.”

  “Do you like England?” I asked.

  “No, it's shit. But Wales and Scotland are nice.”

  I have to admit to being guilty of this myself. When I moved to Austria in the mid-90s my British friends and I would refer to home not as England or Old Blighty, but as Mingland or Old Shitey. Then a new lad, Ben, joined us. Ben didn't like our negativity. He told us Britain was a great place. We dismissed his arguments while continuing to slag off the place.

  We were young, and pumped on an exciting new life abroad, but we weren't the only ones knocking the UK. There were plenty of other people to tell us the country was rubbish. An entire industry makes its fortune by dumping on Britain. There was a book called Crap Towns that struck such a chord with its disaffected British readers they complained their own home towns weren't included. There are now three books in the series.

  And then there are websites such as ilivehere.co.uk. It allows you to state exactly why your home town is so bloody awful. Television programmes like Rip Off Britain are part of the same dismal scheme, as is nearly every story in nearly every edition of every tabloid newspaper. Even our politicians, the one group you'd expect to stay positive for Queen and country in the face of all reality, have described the place as 'broken'. We've been conditioned to rip ourselves to pieces and to enjoy doing so, like confused cannibals joyfully eating our own limbs.

  While I lived in Austria, and later in Spain, if I told someone I was from Britain they would invariably respond with a tale of some great recent visit and my only response was a genuinely astonished, “Really?” Britain seemed more popular with people who hadn't actually lived there.

  And we do have a well-founded reputation for moaning. The Aussies don't call us whinging poms for nothing. We moan about the weather, the government, the NHS, the roads, about, well, everything. It's a national pastime. Why is that? Is it because, as moaners, we see everything as rubbish? Or is it because everything is rubbish that we like to moan? Even as far back as 1758, writer Arthur Murray said the British are “never so happy as when you tell them they are ruined”. This probably explains the popularity of the Daily Mail.

  The route near the end of my European bike ride had seen me slog from Harwich in Essex to Cardiff, and then up to Holyhead. I was aiming for speed. It was the end of 22,000 miles on the road and I just wanted to get it finished. The Welsh leg of that trip had been enjoyable enough but the south-central strip of England, jumping from one large, nondescript urban area to the next, was as much fun as a head massage from Abu Hamza.

  But the following ride, when we tried to survive for £1 a day (Hungry for Miles), took us down the west coast from Liverpool eventually to Poole in Dorset and suddenly actual areas of the country seemed truly magnificent. Hang on a minute, I thought. Maybe these were the amazing places those Spaniards and Austrians had visited. Or maybe they'd actually gone to Brittany for their holidays and just misheard where I was from.

  Now, there will be some of you reading this thinking, “Of course Britain is great. What's wrong with you?” Unless you're a Union Flag-tattooed member of the British Nationalist Party, I bet yours isn't one of those towns heavily and – who knows? – perhaps justifiably slated by Crap Towns or ilivehere.co.uk. Like I said, it depends on where you're from. I was from a rubbish bit, Blackburn, but I didn't want to moan any longer. Ben, that ambassador for Britain in Austria, was right. It's all too negative.

  I was sitting in The Welkin, a Wetherspoon's in the centre of Liverpool (“more like Live-in-Stool”, according to one anonymous poster on ilivehere.co.uk). The city was up to its old tricks again. Three twenty-something Scousers hung around the pub's exit, not doing anything but scanning the place in a menacing manner. Their threat was negated, however, by their high-pitched Liverpudlian whine that only dogs and other Scousers can hear. Then a wasted-looking scally slinked like a jackal from table to table offering a half-open carrier bag to its occupants.

  “Want some perfume, mate?” he whispered urgently.

  Funnily enough, I didn't.

  I've visited Liverpool so many times and I've yet to experience a t
rip that doesn't involve criminality at some level: a three-way street fight, someone who openly admitted to being smacked off his tits on cocaine, a friend getting his nose broken and, this time, being offered clearly stolen goods. It's almost like they enjoy the stereotype and want to reinforce it.

  The whining lads disappeared and the jackal took his unsold wares to another venue. Then in walked three Americans, two women and a man in their thirties. They sat at the table next to mine. Some American tourists take a very unadventurous view of travel. I once saw a stream of them in wonderful Salzburg shuffle past a row of great Austrian restaurants to seek solace in the local McDonald's to eat exactly the same mundane crap they could get back home. Today's Americans weren't like that though.

  “I guess we should try fish 'n' chips,” said one of the women loudly.

  The phrase “fish 'n' chips” sounded awkward in her mouth, as though it were a foreign phrase, which I suppose it was. She made the humble battered cod and spuds sound exotic, a delicacy, like deep-fried parrot in a platypus sauce.

  Then the bloke chipped in.

  “Yeah, an' we should try a,” he said, before pausing for a second, “a lager.”

  How could a word associated with fizzy piss suddenly sound so adventurous and desirable? Didn't he know it was exactly the same gassy pop that Budweiser made back home? It didn't matter. Here, abroad, it was sexy.

  The reason I was sitting here was because tomorrow I was about to begin another bicycle ride, a very British one. And right now I realised these Americans were experiencing Britain in exactly the way I wanted to see the country. I hadn't lived in the UK for twenty years but I needed to view it as though it were my first time, uncynically and full of mystery. I wanted to witness Britain with the eyes of a foreigner, of a traveller. In some instances this wouldn't be difficult; there was an awful lot of Britain I'd never seen. And just as I'd done while cycling around Europe, I wanted to hunt out the local food, meals and snacks that, for whatever reason, hadn't been adopted by the country as a whole but had stayed local. I wasn't expecting anything as unusual as poo-flavoured sausages from the Ardennes or Turkey's intestine sandwiches but there would surely be something hidden in the dark corners of Britain's delis and takeaways, other than E.coli.

  The Americans sat at their table, repeatedly straining their necks to look for passing waiters, who never materialised because of course this was a British pub.

  “You need to go to the bar to order,” I said.

  They looked towards the counter with its beer pumps and its optics and then back at each other, seemingly considering whether such a journey required the use of a car.

  In Britain, at least in pubs, we now take it for granted that you hand over your money for your dinner before it arrives. I've always been a bit suspicious of that. You can hardly refuse to pay for an undercooked chicken breast if you've already stumped up the cash. It doesn't happen anywhere else in the world as far as I know. These Americans were learning the weirdnesses of travel in Britain, the things you have to do to operate in this foreign country.

  The American man wandered off to the bar and one of the women received a phone call. She told her friend on the other end what they'd been up to today. By the way, please don't think I was earwigging. Everyone this side of the Wirral could hear her.

  “We came in on the train from Manchester,” she said, her accent making the northern city sound as exhilarating as Bangkok, “to Liverpool. We got a cab to give us a tour. He charged us £150 and so we tipped £100.” Result! Some Scouse taxi driver was living la vida loca tonight. Sometimes you import your own country's weirdnesses to a foreign place and no one tells you it's weird. The locals just smile and take your cash.

  The phone call ended and my thoughts returned to my upcoming trip. I don't like planning. It's tedious, all those calculations regarding how far you have to travel each day to reach the next campsite or the hotel you've booked. A bicycle is supposed to represent freedom. But where's the freedom if you've tied yourself to an immutable schedule? From past experience I know the most fun days on the road were always the most spontaneous ones: an invite to an Orthodox Easter party in Ukraine, watching a Preston lass pogo up and down at a country dancing rehearsal in the Czech Republic's Brno, being given a tour of a roofless, wall-less “house” near a lake in Bulgaria by a man who lived under a table. Some people like to know ahead of time exactly where they'll sleep each night of their journey. Not me. There'd be no planning. I didn't want to know where I'd end up. That way, it could be at a beer festival or maybe 'round Billy Piper's gaff.

  I wanted to see the whole of Britain and so I decided the best way to do this was to cycle through each and every county. Friends asked me how many counties there are, as though this is a simple fact that everyone should know – like the country's longest river or its tallest mountain – and that had somehow passed them by. But it's not as easy as that. The counties keep changing, merging, splintering and reforming, like an old rock band who hate each other but whose ex-wives have spent all the royalties.

  In the case of England, many former counties have become smaller counties, city councils and unitary authorities and this is messy. As a result I decided to ignore these new divisions for England. It has 47 mainland ceremonial counties, the ones everyone has heard of, and that's quite enough, thanks.

  Wales was for a long time made up of a few large, clunky counties that have now been smashed into 21 smaller councils, and so for reasons of total inconsistency I was going to visit these new, smaller ones.

  This was the case for Scotland too, where I would visit the 29 new, generally trimmer councils. I say “generally” because after the recent changes Highland became one humongous entity, absorbing Caithness, Sutherland and other places and is now approximately the size of Belgium.

  So, in total, this added up to a not-nice, not-round 97 counties through which to heave my heavy bike. The only thing I'd planned was where to start, where to finish and the approximate order in which I'd see the counties to make my trip as efficient as possible and, as it turned out, I didn't even manage to do that right. Everything else about the trip would be determined by others and by spontaneity. From the outside I'd give the appearance of a man with an over-arching plan but, in reality, I'd be winging it. Much like David Moyles, but on a bicycle.

  I threw my idea out to Facebook as well as a couple of cycling forums and hundreds of suggestions for places to visit came flooding in. Time would prevent me from seeing them all, but I'd try to visit as many as possible. Surely this was the best way to enjoy Britain even if no one had so far provided the date and time of that party at Billy Piper's.

  I left Wetherspoon's and wandered around Liverpool's town centre. It was mid-April and a bitter wind blew over Strawberry Field and down Penny Lane and whatever the hell street I was on. The town was rammed. Today had been the Grand National and the winning gamblers were out giving it large. The party atmosphere was a pleasant change from Liverpool's usual feel when darkness descends, that someone is about to knife you in the head for the cost of a packet of Pokémon stickers.

  And then I recognized another of Britain's weirdnesses, one of those things that isn't the case elsewhere: Every single bar in Liverpool had a team of bouncers hanging around outside, fat men squeezed into little, black jackets, meaty top halves and tiny legs of string. One guy had a neck as wide as his head and a fat, bald scalp that rippled unattractively. It looked like his brain was on the outside. Why is it possible for residents of other countries' cities to go out for a drink without the need for security staff? Apparently in Britain, for every one hundred people out drinking, one will require medical treatment as a result. Would this figure be higher without the bouncers or are they responsible for the injuries? Maybe we'd be better off with doctors on the door.

  I headed into a busy bar. Having noticed a beer called Britannia Navigation on draft, and because I'd decided to call this trip Route Britannia, it seemed like the obvious choice, but it was a thin, disa
ppointing drink. Don't worry, at this stage I was still allowed to moan. I wouldn't set off officially until the morning. From then on it would be positively all the way. Or for as long as I could manage it.

  I sat at a table and clocked the menu, quickly realising the pub was part of a chain. I'd already decided that while wending my way around Britain I'd avoid chains wherever possible. I wanted local, not mass-produced rubbish from a business identical no matter where you came across it, whether Dundee, Doncaster or Droitwich. I decided to get my dinner elsewhere.

  I bought another beer from an off licence and was given a black carrier bag to put it in. This is what had happened everywhere in Turkey. (If you bought a soft drink there, you won yourself a white carrier bag.) I liked this reminder of Europe. It had felt oddly exotic to be treated this way in Ankara. Maybe some of that exoticism could leach into my experience of Britain. Perhaps if enough memories of former foreign rides were triggered as I toured the country then Britain could feel like the whole of Europe rather than what my friends and I had believed it to be before, the Hole of Europe.

  I stopped at a kebab shop, one of those with a smooth, grey elephant's leg spinning in the window. I took my dinner and beer back to my room. I'd asked for a small kebab, which was a good choice since even this one was massive. A large one would have contained the entire horse. But I made the mistake of asking for chilli sauce – I bit into it and screamed like a six-year-old girl – forgetting that, in Britain, kebab shop chilli sauce is hot enough to melt your teeth.

  My hotel – the cheapest I could find – had an interesting, very British scheme offering you a free drink if you chose not to have your bedding changed each morning. But the killjoys would only allow you to do this for three days in a row so that long-term guests were prevented from lying in their own faeces while the glasses slowly collected around their beds. The hotel's marketeers clearly knew their clientele. Brits in hotels might generally want crisp bed linen but it wasn't a deal-breaker if a free drink was at stake.