Why take any day trips from London? After all London has so much to see and do. Who could ever be bored there?
But escaping London is not about being bored. It’s about seeing the quieter parts of England, experiencing a different type of history and seeing the countryside and smaller towns of this most interesting land. Many visitors are often surprised to discover that London wasn’t always the nation’s capital.
And getting out of the city is easy to do. The UK, despite what many British people might tell you, has a fairly good public transport system – both by bus or train. As a result, all the journeys in this book can be made after breakfast and you can be back in your hotel room and tucked up in bed by night time.
But train and bus schedules do change. As a result, we’ve resisted including any timings here. However we have included website addresses for the most up-to-date information.
Train travel is frequently cheaper after 10am but check that any cheap ticket does not restrict your return journey to after 6 pm or later. Please buy a ticket before you board the train, ticket inspectors are not the most sympathetic of creatures. Tickets can be bought from sales desks and machines around most stations.
Coach travel is often, although not always, cheaper than train. We tend to use the term ‘bus’ to refer to travel inside a city. A ‘coach’ refers to buses that travel between towns. Most coaches from London leave from Victoria Coach Station, not far from the Victoria train and tube stations.
Please note that this is not an in-depth guide. Instead, we hope to provide information on where you can go from London in a day, how to get there and a brief taste of what each place might offer. Longer trips out of London require more extensive, and expensive, guide books.
There are no maps in this book – which keeps it all reasonably priced. Instead we expect you to print out Google maps in advance or use the maps that most of us can access in our phones.
So have fun with your explorations.