The Book Lover's Bucket List

With a foreword by Tracy Chevalier

Start with Chaucer, Dickens, Blake and Larkin in Westminster Abbey. Hop on a bus through Zadie Smith’s North London or spend an afternoon at Colliers Wood Nature Reserve in Nottinghamshire and look at the lake ‘all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow’ that D. H. Lawrence described in Women in Love. Come back to London to walk along Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and try to push a trolley through the wall of Platform 93⁄4 at King’s Cross Station.

From the Brontë parsonage in Haworth to Waugh’s Castle Howard; from Beatrix Potter’s Lake District, Shakespeare’s Stratford and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh, there are gardens, monuments, museums, churches and a surprising quantity of stained glass. There are walks both urban and rural, where you can explore real landscapes or imaginary haberdasher’s shops. There‘s the club where Buck’s Fizz was invented and a pub where you can eat Sherlock’s Steak & Ale Pie. And there’s a railway station where you can stroke the muzzle of one of the world’s most famous and endearing bears.

You can start in Cornwall and work your way up to the Gateway to the Scottish Highlands, taking detours to Northern Ireland in the west and Norfolk in the east. Or you can drop in on spec on the place nearest to you. Wherever you are in the United Kingdom, you’re never far fromsomething associated with a good book.