The Rough Guide to England, 4th Edition - Softcover

To get to grips with England, London is the place to start. Nowhere else in the country can match the scope and innovation of the metropolis, a colossal, frenetic city, perhaps not as immediately attractive as its European counterparts, but with so much variety that lack of cash is the only obstacle to a great time. It's here that you'll find England's best spread of nightlife, cultural events, museums, galleries, pubs and restaurants. Each of the other large cities, such as Birmingham, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, has its strengths, though to be honest these regional centres don't rank among the most alluring of destinations. For many people they come a long way behind ancient cities such as Lincoln, York, Salisbury, Durham and Winchester, to name just those with the most celebrated of England's cathedrals. Left adrift by the industrialization of the last century and spared the worst of postwar urban development, these cities remain small-scale and manageable, more hospitable than the big commercial and industrial centres. Most beguiling of all are the long-established villages of England, hundreds of which amount to nothing more than a pub, a shop, a gaggle of cottages and a farmhouse offering bed and breakfast - Devon, Cornwall, the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales harbour some especially picturesque specimens, but every county can boast a decent showing of photogenic hamlets.

Evidence of England's pedigree is scattered between its settlements as well. Wherever you're based, you're never more than a few miles from a ruined castle, a majestic country house, a secluded chapel or a monastery, and in some parts of the country you'll come across the sites of civilizations that thrived here before England existed as a nation. In the southwest there are remnants of a Celtic culture that elsewhere was all but eradicated by the Romans, and from the south coast to the northern border you can find traces of prehistoric settlers - the most famous being the megalithic circles of Stonehenge and Avebury.

Then of course there's the English countryside, an extraordinarily diverse terrain from which Constable, Turner, Wordsworth, Emily Bront and a host of other native luminaries took inspiration. Most dramatic and best known are the moors and uplands - Exmoor, Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, the North York Moors and the Lake District - each of which, especially the Lakes, has its over-visited spots, though a brisk walk will usually take you out of the throng. Quieter areas are tucked away in every corner of England, from the lush vales of Shropshire near the border with Wales, to the flat waterlands of the eastern Fens and the chalk downland of Sussex. It's a similar story on the coast, where the finest sands and most rugged cliffs have long been discovered, and sizeable resorts have grown to exploit many of the choicest locations. But again, if it's peace you're after, you can find it by heading for the exposed strands of Northumbria, the pebbly flat horizons of East Anglia or the crumbling headlands of Dorset.

When to go

Considering the temperateness of the English climate, it's amazing how much mileage the locals get out of the subject - a two-day cold snap is discussed as if it were the onset of a new Ice Age, and a week in the upper 70s Fahrenheit starts rumours of drought. The fact is that English summers rarely get hot and the winters don't get very cold, and there's not a great deal of regional variation, as the chart shows. The average summer temperature in the landlocked Midlands is much the same as down on the southwest beaches, and within a degree or two of the average in the north. Summer rainfall is fairly even over all of England as well, though in general the south gets more hours of sunshine than the north. Differences between the regions are slightly more marked in winter, when the south tends to be appreciably milder and wetter than the north.

The bottom line is that it's impossible to say with any degree of certainty that the weather will be pleasant in any given month. May might be wet and grey one year and gloriously sunny the next, and the same goes for the autumnal months - November stands an equal chance of being crisp and clear or foggy and grim. Obviously, if you're planning to lie on a beach, or camp in the dry, you'll want to go between June and September - a period when you shouldn't go anywhere without booking your accommodation well in advance. Elsewhere, if you're balancing the likely fairness of the weather against the density of the crowds, the best time to get into the countryside or the towns would be between April and early June or in September or October.