Places:
Other Places I Visited in 2024
Friday, 24 January 2025My 2024 travels featured walking in Australia (The Three Capes Track in Tasmania) and England (The Thames Path). My English travels also took me to that very popular tourist county of Cornwall. Before arriving in England I visited three interesting African countries: Kenya, South Sudan and Nigeria. In Europe my travels included Albania, the Cote d’Azur in the south of France and Malaga in Spain. Travelling In India I started with New Delhi and Jaipur then went up to the Mussoorie, Rishikesh and Haridwar hill stations. Then I did a USA road trip across Missouri between Kansas City and St Louis before continuing on to Charleston in South Carolina.
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▲ Glory of St Ignatius Fresco in the Chiesa de Sant’Ignazio di Loyola
I was in Rome for a Gaze on the Future (Sguardi sul futuro) conference for Lonely Planet’s Italian partners EDT and paid more than one visit to the magnificent church on the Piazza di Sant’Ignazio where we also dined until all hours in the Ristorante da Sabatino. Yes that ceiling fresco is utterly astonishing, but it wasn’t until later that I discovered it has also become one of Europe’s top Instagram attractions. It didn’t feel too crowded with social media enthusiasts when I was admiring it.
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Way back in the 1960s (yes, I am very old) I studies engineering at Warwick University in Coventry and in after Zurich and before Rome I went back to the university to launch the Wheeler History of Travel Writing programme. Now there’s lots of interest around Coventry – Warwick, Stratford-upon-Avon, Leamington Spa – and lots of interest in Coventry itself, including the terrific Coventry Transport Museum. After all Coventry was not just England’s Motor City, earlier on it was also England’s pioneering bicycle centre. But the windswept Coventry town centre? When we did the first Lonely Planet Britain guidebook I wrote up Coventry and said something about ‘poor Coventry, blitzed by the Luftwaffe in WW II and then blitzed again by British town planners.’ On my 2024 visit, 30 years had brought no improvement in Lower Precinct, it was still windswept, empty, miserable.
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It stood there until 2003 when it was disassembled again and in 2004 rebuilt at its current location as a gateway into Paternoster Square, right across from Wren’s magnificent St Paul’s Cathedral. That’s a very short distance from its original location where The Strand turns into Fleet St. It is now the official home of the livery company, the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects. In 2019 I did the speech when Barry Munday took up the role of Master for the Company. The Company can use the room above the gate for dinners and that’s how I ended up having a terrific dinner in what is clearly a pretty amazingly historic place. Fortunately there were no heads of traitors impaled on spikes just above us as we dined.
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Private gardens are a London oddity, there are a huge number of these private squares where the only people allowed to use them live in houses around the square and have a key to get in. One weekend a year – in 2025 that will be 7 and 8 June – 100-plus of these usually-shut-away gardens open the gates for visitors. Go online to London Parks & Gardens to buy a £26.40 ticket for that once a year London Open Gardens opportunity. One of the best know of these private gardens is Rosmead Garden in W11 where the Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant characters in the 1999 film Notting Hill (yes that’s where it is) enjoyed one of their most important encounters.
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Blue Plaques are a London feature and you can download an app to find them. Most of them note that ‘somebody notable’ lived here and some notables seem to have seeded plaques all around London. I did a Sunday bicycle ride around George Orwell’s London which featured a number of Orwell plaques, he kept on running out of money and had to move to less expensive digs.
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◄ In October 2024 a very official looking ‘blue plaque’ appeared on the front of the Tesco Supermarket in Walthamstow where the lettuce which outlasted England shortest term prime minister Liz Truss was purchased. Unfortunately spoil sport Tesco soon took it down, but it was nice to have ‘good news,’ if only briefly.
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