About Britain

In 1951, the Festival of Britain published a series of 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, historian 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. In a starkly different era - the 2020s - where travel has been transformed by COVID-19, and many are looking to journey closer to home, About Britain is a timely meditation on our changing relationship with the landscape, with motor vehicles and with each other.

The book is structured around twelve of the 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 Tim follows the Festival of Britain's original routes. Published with stunning maps and photographs, About Britain is a delightfully written and wonderfully retro look at our unique British culture and heritage, packaged to recall the guides as they first appeared.

About the Author

Professor Tim Cole is Professor of Social History at Bristol University and Director of the Brigstow Institute, conducting research into what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. His first book Images of the Holocaust (Duckworth and Routledge US) was shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book Award. In 2003 he published Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto with Routledge and in 2011 Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying In and Out of the Ghettos (Continuum) which was commended by the jury of the Fraenkel Prize.