So perhaps the heart of England is

So perhaps the heart of England is found in its towns and cities instead? Many, it’s true, have a restless energy and a talent for reinvention. So for every person who wants to stand outside the gates of Buckingham Palace or visit the Houses of Parliament, there’s another who makes a beeline for the latest show at Tate Modern, the cityscape of downtown Manchester or the revitalized Newcastle waterfront. Yet this flowering of urban civic pride is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it’s been steady since the Industrial Revolution, and industry – and the Empire it inspired – has provided a framework for much of what you’ll see as you travel around. Virtually every English town bears a mark of former wealth and power, whether it be a magnificent Gothic cathedral financed from a monarch’s treasury, a parish church funded by the tycoons of the medieval wool trade, or a triumphalist civic building raised on the back of the slave and sugar trades. In the south of England you’ll find old dockyards from which the navy patrolled the oceans, while in the north there are mills that employed entire town populations. England’s museums and galleries – several of them ranking among the world’s finest – are full of treasures trawled from its imperial conquests. And in their grandiose stuccoed terraces and wide esplanades, the old seaside resorts bear testimony to the heyday of English holiday towns, at one time as fashionable as any European spa.

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