Adrian Mourby is a UK-based travel writer who has published four novels alongside two travel guides and a book of humour based on his award-winning Radio 4 series Whatever Happened To...? He has travelled to most parts of the world but would cite Cambodia, Antarctica, Istanbul, Finland, Venice, Luxor, Zanzibar, Burma, Namibia and Sinai amongst his most interesting journeys. Adrian also writes about the UK for European and American publications. His travel journalism has appeared in every UK broadsheet and numerous in-flight and luxury magazines.
12-12-2019
The borderland between Scotland and England takes in Hadrian's Wall, the fortified city of Newcastle Upon Tyne and many well-defended manor houses. This was for centuries a ‘No Man's Land', open, wild and dangerous as armies...
12-12-2019
Until the nineteenth century Wales was underpopulated and undervisited. Consequently it never developed a sequence of coaching inns as in England. Tourist hotels when they came to Wales arrived with the railways, large Victor...
12-12-2019
For me, the West Country begins in Bath and extends down to Bristol and into Somerset. It's an area of beautiful cities and gentle countryside framed by the M4 to the north and the M5 to the west. As soon as you leave either,...
12-12-2019
The Lake District wasn't always a tourist attraction. Daniel Defoe called this pastoral landscape “the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even Wales itself.” But by the end of th...
12-12-2019
The British seaside holiday was invented on the south coast of England when George III's family, and then the aristocracy, left London to go seabathing for their health. Once a new fashion had been created, the middle and wor...
12-12-2019
Travel through Hampshire, Dorset and Devon and you rapidly leave behind those seaside resorts that owe their existence to day-trippers from London. Christchurch, Lyme Regis and Torquay are old coastal settlements along what...
12-12-2019
The history of the Scottish Highlands has a very different narrative from the rest of Great Britain, even from the rest of Scotland. The clans ruled this rugged landscape for centuries, based around powerful families like the...
12-12-2019
Does any country in the world have so many festivals per square mile? These days Britain's arts festivals run from early spring to late autumn and cover pretty much the entire country. It can sometimes seem that there are ver...
12-12-2019
London's hotels are younger than many historic buildings in the city. Until the end of the nineteenth century, British hotels were often considered rather disreputable—even in the capital. But these great structures have live...
12-12-2019
We rush around so much these days I feel we have lost the sense of glamour that used to attach to road journeys. Recreate the days when touring Britain by car was an adventure rather than a way to get from A to B. This islan...
12-12-2019
Wherever you go in Britain you'll find plaques commemorating visits by our numerous kings and queens. These days a royal visit can be a fleeting thing bookended by car, train or helicopter arrivals and departures, but in the...
12-12-2019
There is something about a good hotel that writers find irresistible. You might say it is because they need the fresh stimulus of change or that writers spend so much time occupying imaginary landscapes that they never really...
12-12-2019
Britain's hotels can provide a lovely backdrop to the countryside in spring and summer but to get the most out of them it's best to visit when the nights are drawing in and you can enjoy those cosy drawing rooms, snug bars an...
12-12-2019
There was a time when wine-drinking in Britain was either very expensive and shrouded in mists of snobbery, or cheap and downright unpleasant. Those of us who wrecked our student-years trying to enjoy the dreaded trio of Lieb...
12-12-2019
Scotland is famous for many things but “Scotch” is probably its best known calling-card around the world. Written records of Scotch whisky can be traced back to 1494 in records of King James IV's accounts, but as a local prod...
12-12-2019
Champagne has been drunk in this country for centuries but the idea of buying it by the glass really only took off with the rise of the cocktail bar in Britain's hotels. Suddenly rather than purchasing a whole bottle, it was...
12-12-2019
The British have been celebrating their landscape since Constable, Gainsborough and Reynolds took their sketch books outside in the eighteenth century. This tradition continued during the nineteenth century with Turner and th...
12-12-2019
The Georgian era in British architecture lasted from the accession of George I, three hundred years ago, until the Regency period. Many people would claim that under the Prince Regent (later King George IV) Britain's experime...
12-12-2019
Purpose-built hotels are a late nineteenth-century phenomenon. Before the word “hotel” became respectable in Britain we had public houses and coaching inns. In the twentieth century many of these were upgraded to become hote...
12-12-2019
The only way to really enjoy Christmas shopping in my opinion is to book into a really good hotel and breakfast well then shop for an hour or so, come back for coffee and put your feet up before another bout of shopping ahead...
12-12-2019
Not all countries have great country hotels. I've travelled in parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans where you always aim to get to a city by nightfall because rural accommodation is very basic. But in Britain we're very fo...
12-12-2019
Summer is almost upon us, which means that across Britain there will be a host of festivals of many different kinds. Last year I wrote about some of the biggest and best UK festivals and where to stay if you were attending t...
12-12-2019
It's that time of year again when, if we aren't enjoying the delights of Britain during the summer, we head off abroad. As we plan our trip to the airport we realise that our flight is so horribly early we'd better book into...
12-12-2019
As the seasons change we often cling on to the last of the summer sunshine. Sometimes I think the British are still pagan, fearing that the shortening of the days means the sun will soon disappear never rise again. While some...
12-12-2019
I've long had a theory that there are tribes when it comes to alcohol. There are beer people, there are whisky people, there are white wine people and red wine people (two sub-tribes) and there are gin people. It's not to do...
12-12-2019
After the toxic delights of Drinkcember and our Christmas bacchanalia, comes Dry January and everyone telling us ‘Tis the Season to Detoxify. For many years January was as joyless as a 31-day hangover with nothing pleasurable...
12-12-2019
One of the best ways to see the British countryside – if not the best – is from the back of a horse. The view is different up there, you can see over hedgerows and walls, you can go through fields without getting your feet m...
12-12-2019
This month Alice through the Looking Glass is released in the UK, yet another British film that makes the most of our countryside and its historic buildings. Not surprisingly a lot of classic hotels have featured in British f...
12-12-2019
In the opening to his novel The Portrait of a Lady, American author Henry James declared, “under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea”...
12-12-2019
Autumn is the only British season that gets us all quoting poetry. Keats put it well with his “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and all those “gathering swallows” twittering in the skies.
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Autumn is certainl...
12-12-2019
Christmas shopping shouldn't be a chore.<br><br>
Many years ago I worked out there are two ways to make it pleasurable. One is to collect presents for people throughout the year as you see things they'd like. This means th...
12-12-2019
Soon it will be New Year and all over the country Drinkcember will give way to the hairshirt self-denial of Dry January. Anything that seemed celebratory over the Christmas period is out, and we will become a nation of herbal...
12-12-2019
I proposed to my first wife above a launderette in Middlesbrough and to my second in the tiny kitchen of my Oxford flat. Neither location was inherently romantic but the end result - in both cases - was positive.<br><br>
T...
12-12-2019
There is something about water – lakes, lochs, rivers, and the sea itself - that answers a very deep need in us all. We are drawn to it. We want to swim in it , sail across it or just walk alongside it listening to the sounds...
12-12-2019
My home is in Oxford which can sometimes feel like living in a film set. It's a familiar experience to find the road you want to walk down closed off by a lighting van and location caterers. But the whole of Britain is a gift...
12-12-2019
It's only when you try hiking in other countries that you realise how very blessed Britain is with its National Trails. I've walked down footpaths in Greece that terminate abruptly in someone's newly built villa or strolled...
12-12-2019
Summer is finally upon us which means, if you are British, that you'll probably be thinking of a trip to the seaside. This nation has a curious relationship with our storm-tossed coast. We love it and it in turn has reciproca...
12-12-2019
Cocktail bars, as opposed to pubs and private drinking clubs, used to be very much a big-city phenomenon in Britain, but the modern hotel has brought what was once a very exclusive drinking experience within reach of most of...
12-12-2019
The big transition from one year to the next is essentially an arbitrary matter. One day we are in this year and the next day we're in another but they're still just two 24 hour days. Nevertheless New Year carries huge signi...
12-12-2019
Not long ago taking a room over a pub was what the traveller did if there were no hotel or boarding house nearby. In the twenty-first century however the British pub with rooms has taken off as a place to stay. The transforma...
12-12-2019
Once upon a time summer time in Britain was synonymous with coastline for most of us. From June till the end of August steam trains delivered families to busy seaside railway stations all over Britain. I remember that the fir...
12-12-2019
In the summertime hotels are bases from which we can venture out and explore the world. In the autumn, as nights get longer and we feel the first chills of winter, the British hotel becomes a place for hiding oneself away - o...
12-12-2019
We all complain that Christmas seems to go on forever. It certainly starts too soon. Even before the bonfires of 5 November have fizzled out is done, department stores will be playing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"...
12-12-2019
Many hotels in Britain were once the homes of lords and ladies, barons and dukes. When Evelyn Waugh published his <i>Brideshead Revisited</i> in 1945 he did not believe that the English country house would survive in new post...
12-12-2019
Walking is good for us. When Bill Bryson hoofed it along the Appalachian Trail, he was delighted how much wisdom he gained and how much weight he lost. Wordsworth used to tramp all day composing poems in his head and Rousseau...
12-12-2019
Once upon a time Britain's pubs and hotels were places where you stayed the night if you lacked friends or relatives nearby. But you certainly didn't go to a pub or hotel to eat. That's what cafés and restaurants were for. Bu...
12-12-2019
For me the run-up to Christmas is as exciting as Christmas itself. Every day in December Britain office workers seem to get less and less work done as shopping, food preparation, writing Christmas cards and planning parties t...
12-12-2019
To me Wales is synonymous with walking. I was once told the principality would be bigger than England if it were flattened out. Certainly there are plenty of hills to clamber up and valleys to saunter down, something that mad...
12-12-2019
I find Shropshire one of England's loveliest counties. For century this green, castellated landscape was part of the Marcher Lands, border territory where Welsh armies clashed with the English king's representatives. Sending...
12-12-2019
Gloucester is the UK's Cotswold County with strings of charming villages built out of this mellow limestone. The wool industry has been kind to Gloucestershire leaving behind lots of attractive, pre-industrial towns and the R...
12-12-2019
The historic wealth of the north of England has given rise to some beautiful cities and also swathes of country houses, many of which have been converted into hotels. I used to live near the North York Moors and found explori...
12-12-2019
In the days when Britain's trade was almost exclusively with Europe this country's east coast ports were important and wealthy. Some of the merchant towns like Lavenham (which has three of Britain's Finest hotels in close pr...
11-12-2019
Britain is a country of eccentricity and individuality, and this is reflected in some of its more unusual hotels. Adrian Mourby chooses ten luxury hotels, dotted around Britain.
27-06-2019
Everyone needs a hobby. Unlike some politicians I don't make model buses out of old wine box-thingies. I prefer gin. Drinking it with tonic, mixing it into martinis or visiting the distilleries where it is made and meeting fe...
09-05-2019
While England has been going through its “Ginaissance”, Scotland has seen its national drink –unfashionable as late as the 1980s - reach stratospheric levels of desirability around the world. Wealthy people want to own bottle...
19-02-2019
London is one of the most exciting places in the world to go out drinking. And drinking is a fine way to spend an evening as long as you're sensible. In London, there are watering holes to cater for just about every taste. Th...
24-04-2018
There are still some countries in Europe where dining rooms hide the fact that they are part of a hotel. It's taken the Italians in particular decades to accept that one can dine well in a hotel. Even so they usually still gi...
20-09-2017
Traditionally summer is when the British go to festivals. Shortly after World War II Edinburgh's International Arts Festival made August synonymous with a celebration of culture. Then in 1970 Glastonbury showed that pop festi...
24-08-2015
Once upon a time a hotel was just somewhere to lay your head if you didn't have a club to go to or friends in town. Now hotels are visions of a better life, a refuge where we can live in greater luxury than any lord, a buildi...
27-07-2015
It wasn't until I had two cats of my own that the words “pet friendly” suddenly began to leap out at me from hotel web pages. What a discovery! While most hotels usually mean well-behaved dogs when they say “pet”, there are...
30-10-2013
We are living in a golden age of British cocktails. Thank goodness. I can remember twenty years ago asking for a dry martini in a British hotel and being given a glass of Martini Rosso with ice cubes. The recent triumph of th...
22-03-2013
North of Birmingham rises the Peak District, an area of outstanding natural beauty - and architectural gems. It's a pleasure to motor round this landscape of farms, villages, stately homes and historic towns like Duffield, M...
14-03-2013
I find the northwest corner of this country is a curious mixture of three distinct areas. In the far north stands the Lake District, a hilly and desolate area until tourism took root belatedly in the early nineteenth century....
09-05-2012
Britain is full of old manor houses and monasteries that have been turned into hotels, as well as coaching inns that date back to the 16th and 17th centuries. Some historic hotels – like the Randolph in Oxford – were purpose...