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

by Steven Primrose-Smith

  On the way there I stopped in Leek, a pretty market town that seemed to have done its best to resist the cancer of chain shops and restaurants. Most of the cafés and snack bars were local as were many of the other businesses. The town's only camping store provided a second, hopefully warmer mat, some thermals and a pair of thick bedtime socks. As the Scandinavians say, “There's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.” But tell that to the residents of Cockermouth, chest deep in flood water.

  The route continued along quieter roads. The sun had tried to remain out but it was mostly a losing battle. Hills came and went, including some silly ones with gradients of 17%. People at the side of the road smiled and waved. And then, ten miles earlier than I was expecting, I popped out in Stone just as I felt the first flecks of rain.

  Under such conditions and with time to kill, a visit for a local pint was required and I descended upon the warm lounge of Langtry's for a mug of Joule's – pronounced 'jowls' – Slumbering Monk brewed not far away in Market Drayton. I'd forgotten it was Saturday and was greeted with more Britishness in the form of Premier League football, Norwich against Sunderland, two places I'd never visited but maybe would before this ride was out. I hoped they'd be more interesting than the match.

  I asked the landlord if he knew anything odd nearby and he recommended The Star Inn, a pub he'd once run and that's in the Guinness Book of Records for having the most number of levels.

  “Is it a tall building?” I asked.

  “No, it's only a single storey building but it's subsided.”

  “Oh.”

  I rode the few metres to The Star and had a pint of refreshing Sunbeam. I asked the landlady how old the pub was. She didn't know. She asked one of her staff.

  “It's...” the barmaid thought for a minute, “...old. Very old.”

  Thanks.

  “But if you like this one,” she continued, “you should see The Crooked House in Dudley.”

  I took my pint to the beer garden, sitting there with a few others, pretending it wasn't freezing.

  My reason for visiting Stone was Pru. I arrived at her house and felt immediately at home. I'd never met her before but she's the sister of Nem, a pal of mine from Austria. They looked so alike, and with the same bubbly mannerisms, it was like talking to my old friend.

  Pru cooked up a Thai green curry and mentioned she'd a tendency to make things too spicy. She dished up the meal. After taking her first spoonful of curry, that thing happened you sometimes see in cartoons, her eyes bulged and steam spurted from her ears.

  My arrival date had clashed with a cultural event Pru was attending and so she got me an extra ticket. We drove up the motorway to a theatre in Crewe – almost all the way back to Congleton – and met her daughter Bella, Bella's boyfriend and his family. The play The 39 Steps was a comedy version of the Hitchcock film and was a lot of fun with a cast of four hard-working actors playing all the roles. The evening felt surreal, a million miles from the previous tent-based evenings I'd enjoyed, and sometimes suffered, on the ride, like I'd fallen into another world, one in which people didn't spend all day every day sweating their tits off while simultaneously being drenched by rain.

  With Bella now on the back seat we headed for home and Pru seemed unsure where to go. We came to a roundabout and she looked to be heading off in entirely the wrong direction.

  “I think you need to go down that one,” I said, pointing to a huge M6 sign.

  “Is it?” she giggled. “Oh yes, alright.”

  Bella piped up from the back with teenage directness.

  “Why are pretending that you aren't like this every single time you drive?”

  *

  Oh look, what was this? Through the curtains of my room I could see a beautiful, blue sky. It was time to get up. I knew this because I could smell bacon.

  After a delicious English breakfast (which I would later discover is exactly the same as a Cornish breakfast, a Welsh breakfast and only differs from a Scottish breakfast by the omission of haggis) I was in front of Pru's house about to leave.

  “You're carrying a helmet,” Pru said, spying it hanging from the back of my bike.

  “Yup.”

  “Why don't you wear it?”

  “I don't like to. I only bring it in case I get stuck on an extremely dodgy road.”

  “You should wear it,” she said, looking serious.

  I could have quoted the usual statistics but, to be honest, I don't even know if they're true. I just hate wearing it.

  “Put it on,” she said. “Please.”

  She'd been kind, and great company, and it seemed to upset her that I was being so cavalier with my skull and so I slipped it on my head, thanked her for everything and cycled off. Two hundred metres down the road it was digging into my head and so I took it off again. Sorry, Pru.

  Chapter 3: A nurse with a verse

  West Midlands, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shrophire

  I arrived in Stafford, one of Britain's many soulless Anytowns, with centres so given over to cut-n-paste chains they're entirely and boringly interchangeable. There's nothing particularly unpleasant about the place. It's just that it's about as memorable as Police Academy 7.

  It's impossible to be positive about this aspect of Britain. The chains leach money from the local community and send it back to the already over-stuffed pockets of their shareholders, slowly bleeding each town dry, the employees on minimum wage and/or zero hour contracts. And whereas a local shopkeeper might take pride in her products this isn't true of chains because there's no relation between the product and the person who sells it. The sole reason for the enterprise is profit. There's no attempt to make something great. The question in the boardroom isn't “How good can we make this for £1.99?”; it's “How crap can we make this and still get away with £1.99?” Fewer coffee beans or less meat or dodgier meat. I've yet to eat a cheap burger from a roadside van that hasn't been orders of magnitude better than a McDonald's. A one euro coffee in any bar in Spain embarrasses the weak, overpriced pap produced by Starbucks. But we rolled over and let them do it and without a concerted effort from the entire population it's too late to go back. And besides, most people probably don't even want to go back. If you're at least guaranteed mediocrity, why risk it for something else?

  Just the other side of Stafford I bumped into a cyclist, Pete. He was retired and aiming to cycle a hundred centuries – one hundred mile bike rides – this year. He warned me against the main road I was planning to use and so we cycled together down a lovely network of leafy lanes in perfect cycling conditions. The route took us through delightful Brewood and past the site of the original Royal Oak near Boscobel House, where Charles II hid as he attempted to scarper to Wales.

  After two hours of pleasant pootling, during which time my brand new cycle computer decided to expire, Pete said goodbye and pointed me on my way. I entered my fifth county, West Midlands, Britain's most densely populated, with over 16,000 tightly-squeezed people per square mile.

  The idea of cycling somewhere so crowded didn't appeal much but the outskirts were more rural and, on the edge of Dudley, I found a lane that felt like I shouldn't have been on it and arrived at The Crooked House.

  The pub is impressively knackered, leaning heavily to its right, looking like it's about to topple over any minute now. Rather than being condemned its owners decided to make a feature of this health and safety nightmare.

  I left my bike outside and went in. You immediately feel like you've had one too many. The wooden floors all slope in different directions and doors either require more effort than normal to budge or fall open unexpectedly, hanging loosely on their hinges. This is what a house would look like if I'd built it.

  I waited for a pint as a chubby fella negotiated the angles. He shuffled unsteadily across the floor and then lunged, arms outstretched, towards the bar, grabbing it with obvious relief. He looked up, shaking his head.

  “This place always fucks me up,” he
said.

  I took my pint of The Tilted Tipple, brewed especially for the pub, and sat outside on a bench in the weak but heartening sunshine. A woman came out of the wobbly pub and tripped over the crooked doorstep. She was followed by a bloke on crutches. I'm not sure he had them when he went inside.

  I considered staying for more but feared it wouldn't take many in a bar like this to have me in a heap in the middle of the floor. Reluctantly, I climbed back on my bike and headed citywards.

  The West Midlands obviously includes Britain's second city, Birmingham, but despite its collection of capital awards – the cycle-to-work capital and tattoo capital of Britain as well as the less appealing “boy racer” capital, divorce capital and rat capital – I had no intention of going anywhere near it.

  My plan was to follow the A459 through Dudley but then the signs gave up and I found myself lost. I was in a town centre, busy with traffic but light on people, just groups of feral-looking, late-teenage kids, gaunt and baseball-capped, jeans hanging low on their meatless backsides.

  The road took me beside a gang of white lads. One of them, using that pretend black accent like a bad impression of Ali G, called out to me. He'd seen the logo on my bike.

  “Oi, KTM boy!” he shouted.

  It wasn't a greeting, but a command to stop. I didn't fancy a chat. He sounded threatening. As a positive it was nice to give him some practice with his alphabet. I reckon if I'd been riding a Dawes Galaxy he'd have been stumped.

  “Oi, KTM boy. Like how much iz dat bike, bruv?”

  I kept cycling.

  “Oi, how much?”

  “Free!” I shouted back.

  I figured if it had no value he probably wouldn't stab me in the throat to get it.

  “Free quid? Free quid?” I heard him ask his mates, confused.

  He'd have been disappointed if he'd taken it. It was probably older than he was and its brittle aluminium welds were now well past their use-by date. It could fall apart at any minute. Which would have been apt around here. This part of Britain was clearly on its arse. I'd really enjoyed my first week of cycling in England's north-west but this wasn't pleasant. Closed down pubs stood between pound shops and bookies. There was no reason to ride here except to tick the West Midlands box. I'd ticked it and wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could, hopefully with my bike and as many limbs attached as possible.

  I eventually make it through Halesowen and found the road to the green village of Romsley, in the Clent Hills, seemingly a thousand miles from the urban sprawl of that afternoon although, in reality, only ten. I cycled up an endless ascent looking for the campsite. I couldn't see it and so I cycled down the other side of the hill and then checked my phone. I'd gone past it, silly sod. I turned around and cycled back up the hill.

  Like the site near Leek, this one was a member of the Camping and Caravanning Club and so offered its cheap Backpacker rate to motor-less visitors like myself. Almost all the best value sites in Britain were members of this club. Don't confuse it with the Caravan Club. They'll charge you the same rate whether you turn up in a £80,000 motor home or a £25 quid tent from Argos.

  I popped to the supermarket to buy something for dinner. At the till, with only two minutes to closing, the Asian owner tried to give me the remaining items in the shop's About-To-Go-Out-Of-Date basket that stood on his counter, including a pack of stewing steak. I really didn't have the fuel to boil the meat for hours on end and so I declined the offer. Hopefully his next customer, probably the last of the day, would appreciate it more. He tried a second time, confused that I could turn down free stuff.

  Back at the tent I cooked up a quick sausagey stew and switched on Radio Four again. I'd never really listened to it before this trip. I'd once tuned in for a comedy starring Prunella Scales years ago and not only was it as funny as anthrax but I couldn't even see where the jokes were supposed to be. I gave it up thinking it wasn't for me, but now, during this Britainfest of a bike ride, I was slowly getting hooked. But not on The Archers. I hated that middle-class soap with a passion, from its twee theme tune to its tedious characters. Even having one of its stars knife her husband couldn't make it worth listening to. Every day at seven o'clock I'd have to turn the radio off or risk smashing it to pieces. At least the schedulers knew the limits of human endurance and limited it to fifteen minutes. It's the world's longest running soap and, Christ, does it feel like it.

  *

  Yesterday's blue skies had clearly been an anomaly. Today we were back to uniform greyness and the sort of blustery wind that made pigeons long for a bus pass.

  On the way out of Romsley I stopped at the supermarket again. At least the stewing steak had disappeared by now. Maybe he'd just put it back on the shelf with a different date label. I bought myself a Gingsters Cornish pasty and immediately regretted it. I resolved to stick to local pie shops from now on. It had a crust like soggy cardboard and less filling than an After Eight mint.

  It was Monday morning and I was on my way to Warwickshire. It should be one of those counties in the middle of England that's difficult to identify in a pub quiz except that its odd shape makes it stand out. It looks like a cartoon whale that's been rotated ninety degrees and badly beaten.

  This part of Britain, where the West Midlands merges with Shakespeare's home county, has a reputation for achieving world records, particularly utterly pointless ones. Take, for example, the recent world's largest gathering of people dressed in Disney costumes – 361 to be exact – or the 428 folk who turned up for the world's largest Taekwondo display in 2013. And then there's Stratford-upon-Avon College, which baked the world's largest meat pie in 1998. It weighed a whopping ten and a half tonnes. Wiganners, dry your eyes!

  But my favourite pointless record was achieved in Coventry in 2014 by students of Warwickshire University when 314 students crammed themselves into a single pair of underpants. The event was to launch that year's Jailbreak event, when students try to get as far from home as possible in 36 hours without money. If the idea of being forced to share your pants with 313 others fills you with horror and you can empathise with anyone whose personal space has been occupied by an army of people with no legitimate claim then you'll see it was entirely fitting that the Jailbreak winner made it all the way to Israel.

  I hung a left towards Stratford-upon-Avon and passed the splendid Wootton Hall with its grand house and little waterfalls in the garden. And then I tumbled into Stratford itself and followed the signs for the racecourse, which also has a campsite. I'd only cycled thirty miles today but I felt sluggish. A week of daily peddling was catching up with me.

  After setting up the tent I walked to the centre of town. Looking at the names of businesses around here it makes you wonder what they would've been called if it wasn't the birthplace of the Bard. There were B&Bs called Shakespeare's View, Hamlet House and Cymbeline House, and Iago Jewellers. That last one was odd, because Iago was a dodgy bugger, but maybe that was true of the jewellers too. It could have been worse. There could have been Othello Marriage Guidance Counsellers or the Richard III Child Care Agency.

  I headed for the HQ of the Royal Shakespeare Company. After Saturday's cultural interlude with Pru I fancied myself a bit more theatre but despite this being the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death there was unfortunately nothing Shakespearean on tonight. But all's well that ends well. I saw the house in which he was supposedly born. In a brick-by-brick relocation that pre-empted Hitler's plan for Rochdale Town Hall, circus impresario P.T. Barnum once planned to take the entire building back with him to the States. It took a committee that included Dickens to gather the necessary funds to prevent this from happening. Barnum's money wasn't wasted though. He spent it instead on circus freaks and a “man-monkey” called Bill.

  I fancied a pint but a sign outside the supposedly oldest pub in town, The Garrick Inn, admits that it wasn't even a pub until the 1800s and so there was no chance of sharing the same space as Shakey himself. Instead, I headed to The Golden Bee on Shee
p Street, a Wetherspoon's, the one chain I was allowing myself on this trip since they sell good beers more cheaply than anywhere else and I'm a skinflint. Like Wetherspoon's everywhere, an old bloke in a long mac leant against the bar, running boney fingers through his greasy grey hair and apologising slurringly. The Eastern European bar manager assured him it was something that had happened loads of time in the past. I never found out what it was. Such is life in Wetherspoon's.

  I was in a good mood. I'd checked the weather forecast for the next three days and it was supposed to be sunshine all the way, and that would certainly help in the pretty counties up next, like Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire. But, as it turned out, perhaps I hadn't checked far enough ahead.

  An old fella in a long lumberjack shirt with pink-streaked hair came in through the back door. He looked like he'd been sleeping rough. As I waited for my nachos to arrive – I fancied a break from my week-long, British diet of pies, pasties and cooked breakfasts – I overheard the middle-aged glass collector talking to him.

  “You need to get yourself sorted, lad. There's snow due on Friday.”

  No! I asked him if it was true. I thought perhaps he got some sort of perverse pleasure out of tormenting the homeless. But he said, yes, an Arctic wind from on its way. The timing was great. It would arrive just at the moment I turned back north. The Wind God still hates me.

  *

  I was woken early by raucous squawking in the branches above my tent. A starling had accused a rook of looking at his bird. The rook told him to keep his beak out, and then feathers went flying.

  After my first eight days of moving generally southwards and eastwards it was time to turn around and head west. I cycled into Alcester. English towns that end in “ester” tend to have unpredictable pronunciations. I found a café and ordered what was billed as a “proper” bacon sandwich.

  “Is it pronounced Alchester, or Alsester?” I asked him.