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Academics, journalists and pundits talk at great length about the conundrum of overtourism; the ready-made solution is simply to swerve the crowds. These three towns are regional centres where you will never need to queue, but will come away culturally stimulated and historically enlightened.

Leicester

Like many people, I’ve spent a lot of my travels going to edges, extremities, ends of the road. I overlooked Leicester because it was so very central – quintessentially in-between. The Fosse Way, from Lincoln to Exeter, bisects it; Watling Street, from Dover to Wroxeter, passes nearby. The stylish, high-spec Jewry Wall museum – which reopened in July after a major redesign – shows how roads and traffic made Roman Leicester (Ratae Corieltauvorum) a wealthy, important hub: sublime mosaics; a gold ring; a bathhouse complex; a wall still standing.

A cluster of medieval and Tudor structures beside the River Soar, including stone gateways, a church and castle motte, indicates a major religious centre. I was the only visitor on a Sunday morning. Near this convenient national crossroads, Richard III was able to gather forces from across the kingdom for the Battle of Bosworth; little good it did him. Leicester’s King Richard III Visitor Centre delineates the whys and wherefores of the blood-drenched savagery of the Wars of the Roses. The mental shift demanded of you as you segue from the vast, interlocking, bastard-rich Plantagenet family trees and riots of heraldry to the quiet science of archaeology and, finally, to the cold, austere tomb of the dead hunchback in the cathedral next door, is not insignificant. This is a city so loaded with history that every new retail and hotel development unearths new treasure or traces of past peoples, like a stratified tell in the Holy Land.

A pint in the Globe allowed some thinking time and – as the former preferred boozer of stockingers – a natural link to Victorian and Edwardian Leicester, which rippled with entrepreneurial energies. Thomas Cook, Walkers crisps, Wolsey clothing and Currys started here. Garments, hosiery and corsetry made the city more like a Lancashire town. Chimneys, mills and, most reassuringly, makers are still in evidence.

The 21st-century city is multipurpose – the centre has diversified from retail into gaming, co-working, education, dining, cocktails, cafes – and famously diverse. The Golden Mile (Belgrave Road) is a thriving, gimmick-free Asian gauntlet for clothes, jewellery, spices, fresh veg and restaurants. The likes of Bobby’s, with its Bollywood-inflected interiors, and Sharmilee won the city the Curry Capital gong in 2024. Belgrave Road was part of the Fosse Way, which is thought-provoking – ancient Rome was multicultural too.
Things to see and do: Guildhall; Abbey Park; King Power Stadium; Curve theatre; De Montfort Hall

Paisley

Someone on Reddit asks: “Why is Paisley even still a place?” Sixty comments follow. At the end of it, I know Paisley is most definitely a place. I have to admit, as an English northerner, I thought of it as somewhere imprecise – suburb, district, city borough. But even on the non-stop train (nine minutes from Glasgow Central), you know you’re crossing a proper green belt and, when you arrive, you see towers and domes above the trees. Paisley stands apart; it stands tall.

Bold buildings hint at booming textile times. The station – the fourth busiest in Scotland – is Scots baronial. The town hall is a capacious neoclassical palace, recently turned into a concert venue. The mighty Abbey, built on the site of a 12th-century Cluniac monastery, is a solemn hulk (minimally subverted by a witty “Alien” gargoyle). St Matthew’s church, designed by local architect William Daniel McLennan, is a blend of perpendicular and art nouveau – somewhat influenced by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Queen’s Cross church in Glasgow, but more strident and startling.

On White Cart Water stand two monumental mills. The massive Anchor Mills is residential and sits beside a weir that resembles a wild waterfall. Mile End Mill is a business centre and has a superb chimney, coffee shop and small textile museum. The dramatic gothic hulk of the Coats building, constructed as a memorial church – and nicknamed the Baptist Cathedral of Europe – is now an event space, used for weddings, proms and as a set for TV series Outlander. Paisley has gone big on repurposing.

The famous Paisley print pattern has its origins in Persia. The teardrop-shaped motif, known as boteh in Farsi, is probably a stylised almond or cypress cone (the cypress was sacred to Zoroastrians). Paisley Museum, undergoing a major refurbishment that will create a display space as good as any in Scotland, owns 1,200 Paisley shawls, as well as looms, pattern books and printing blocks. I was allowed to see the interior on a hard-hat tour and saw a Paisley-emblazoned guitar case and a Ken doll in a Paisley top.

The Paisley pattern features in street art and in the Buddie Walk of Fame, a series of 10 plaques spread around the town centre that honour local legends, living and dead. They include TV show Porridge’s Fulton Mackay; playwright, designer and painter John Byrne – whose Slab Boys Trilogy, originally titled Paisley Patterns, is set in a carpet-making factory; Tom Conti; Paolo Nutini; Phyllis Logan; and Gerry Rafferty (whose Baker Street can be read as an angst-ridden lament from London to his home town of Paisley). Byrne’s and Rafferty’s plaques should really have been placed at Ferguslie Park, the socially marginalised district from which they hailed. As did Gordon Williams, author of the novel From Scenes Like These, a blistering, honest, funny portrayal of social deprivation, violence, sex and booze, as good as anything by Alan Sillitoe, and nominated for the first ever Booker prize in 1969. The novel was long ignored but recently rediscovered. Like Paisley.
Things to see and do: Sma’ Shot Cottages; Paisley Heritage Tours; Mural Trail

Nelson

No town is born totally ex nihilo, but Nelson in Lancashire comes close. An early description is “a peat covered and rain sodden wilderness”. An 1844 map shows a cotton factory, two chapels, the New Inn and a post office. The canal, opened in 1816, enabled the fledgling settlement to ship its wares. When the railway came in 1849, it was known as Marsden – but there was already a Marsden in Yorkshire. The train guard would shout “Nelson!” as the train came to a halt by the Lord Nelson inn. The name stuck. Locals boast, half-heartedly, that it’s the only town named after a pub.

Two thousand terrace houses sprang up around the station – built from stone, many are still there, laid out on a gridiron plan. Mid-19th-century Nelson had nine small general stores, two drapers, two druggists, one tailor and one stationer. There was a saddler’s shop and two smithies. By 1876, to these were added butchers, cabinet-makers, chemists, cloggers, drapers, glass and china dealers, grocers, greengrocers, ironmongers and tobacconists – plus corner shops, fish-and-chip shops and 21 grocery and provisions branches run by the Co-operative Society. There were more than a dozen each of pubs and churches or chapels. What towns – and townspeople – miss isn’t only what we remember from our own lifetimes.

More than 20 mills clacked and whirred with thousands of looms. By 1921, almost 18,000 Nelson residents – divided equally between men and women – worked in weaving. Nine tenths of Nelson’s buildings and population were dedicated to textiles. I’d seen the sad husk of Whitefield Mill from the canalside. All that remains of Riverside Mill is a chimney. Lomeshaye Bridge Mill and Spring Bank Mill survive as mixed-use spaces. Brierfield Mill has been converted into posh flats. A 40ft-high shuttle on the high street is meant to remind people of the weaving heyday; it’s an ineffectual monument, unable to convey anything of the power, graft, suffering or pride of the old times.

There were also minor industries in brewing, quarrying, coalmining, corn-milling, soap manufacture, brick- and pipe-making and engineering. The Victory V lozenge, originally made with ether and chlorodyne (containing chloroform, the opiate laudanum and cannabis), was a local invention. A more mass-market mouth-pleaser was developed by an Austrian confectioner employed at Fryers in the 1860s. He was asked to make a mould for jelly bears, but the resulting sweets looked like newborn infants. They were rebranded as “Unclaimed Babies”. That name didn’t stick, and so Jelly Babies were born.

Nelson is a radical left haven. Weaving unions were strong and often militant. A local newspaper called the town Little Moscow. The first world war saw the emergence of a sizeable pacifist movement, leading to schisms between conscientious objectors and those who believed in the national war aims. Britain’s first working-class female novelist, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, addressed a crowd of 20,000 at Victoria Park (formerly Victoria Recreation Ground), calling for an end to war as part of the Women’s Peace Crusade. Her 1925 novel, This Slavery, has just been reimagined in graphic form.

The building that best embodies local radical history is Unity Wellbeing Centre on Vernon Street – known as the Independent Labour Party Socialist Institute when it opened in 1908. One foundation stone, in memory of William Morris and Edward Fay, was laid by Katharine Bruce Glasier, a prominent ILP figure, known as “the grandmother of the Labour party”. The other, in memory of Caroline Martyn and Enid Stacy, was laid by Selina Cooper, who had moved to Nelson from Cornwall with her family in 1875 following her father’s death. She started working in the mills aged 10 as a half-timer then full time from the age of 13. Cooper played a leading role in politicising and organising local female textile workers. She lived at 59 St Mary Street, which has a plaque – though not an official English Heritage one.

The streets of stone terraces are attractive and many open on to bracing views of Pendle Hill’s south-eastern face and the steep slope that plummets down from the summit – beloved of fell runners – called the Big End. Nelson also opens vistas in the mind, and pilgrims travel in both directions – to the fells and moors, and to the cobbled streets and regenerated mills.
Things to see and do: Seedhill Cricket Ground and West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine’s house; 66 bus ride to Clitheroe via Pendle Hill; Clarion House; Two Toms Trail

Chris Moss’s trips were supported by Paisley First, VisitScotland and Visit Leicester.

Tis the season to be beside the seaside – and to hype and critique coastal towns in surveys and rankings. I suppose lists of this year’s “in” and “out” resorts help tourists decide where to go; no point going to Skegness for Michelin-starred food, or to Salcombe for a laugh and cheap beer. Less obvious coastal towns provide more nuanced fare. Perhaps the most alluring spots are those where we don’t forget the sea. These three towns are routinely ranked last resorts or else ignored altogether, but they offer more than stuff to eat, drink, buy and post on socials – and are close to swimmable beaches.

Ayr, Ayrshire

A century ago, Clyde steamers and the Glasgow and South Western Railway took thousands of sunseekers from inland towns to the Ayrshire coast. They came to escape the smoke and noise of industry, breathe in the briny air, and admire the Isle of Arran and tiny Ailsa Craig – from afar or up close on an excursion. The bed and breakfasts on elegant Park Circus (a sweeping crescent lined with cherry trees that blossom red on one side and white on the other) and the Georgian villas on Eglinton Terrace evoke something of the golden days of yore.

It’s easy to imagine parasol-sporting ladies and tall-hatted gents strolling across the Low Green, a large field between the town centre and the beach. This open space – perfect for picnics, kite-flying and impromptu games – and the absence of any clutter on the prom make the seafront unusually peaceful. It’s as if Ayr has refused to become a traditional resort. No tat, no tack, not many tourists. There are places to play on swings and get an ice-cream or a pint, but lovers of amusement arcades and bucket-and-spade shops should probably stay away. On the short block beside the Low Green the buildings are mainly residential – including care homes, that standard fixture of coastal towns.

The beach is a golden sweep about two miles in length, with the old harbour at the north end. Wharves and quays once bustled all along the River Ayr. By the 14th century, this was Scotland’s principal west coast port. In the 18th century, more than 300 ships were moored every year, unloading American tobacco, French wine, Spanish salt, English earthenware and slate from Easdale in the Firth of Lorn. Walk south and you come to the ruins of Greenan Castle, a 16th-century clifftop tower. The sunsets over Arran are life-enhancing. I watched a woman of retirement age do her tai chi moves while keeping her eyes fixed on the island – spiritually separate from the dog-walkers and prom-striders.

Robert Burns was born near Ayr and baptised in the Auld Kirk. In Tam o’ Shanter he writes: “Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses, / For honest men and bonny lasses”. A lively pub on the high street, which is set back a good mile from the beach, is named after the poem; it claims to be the oldest in Ayr, but so does the Black Bull on the opposite side of the river. The old bridge (or Auld Brig, if you prefer, which inspired another Burns poem) that takes you across is pedestrianised and a beauty. All the old pubs are enticing but I had my most enjoyable, peaceful beer and dram in the Twa Dugs – also named for a Burns poem. In Ayr’s Waterstones, I found a long-overlooked 1969 Booker-nominated novel by Gordon M Williams, From Scenes Like These, that provided a brutally realistic riposte to Burns-esque takes on rural Scotland. I read it in the boozers, the caffs, on benches.

People in Ayr will tell you the town has declined. They’ll tell you that in nine out of 10 seaside resorts. But this column gets me around, and I can vouch for the town’s general busyness and good looks. Sedate, somewhat stern, bereft of traditional fun stuff, it’s an ideal hideaway for those who want to do beach walks, read or write, and check into small, friendly guest houses.
Things to see and do: Rozelle House Museum, Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, Culzean Castle and Country Park

Bangor, Gwynedd

Bangor, the oldest city in Wales, came second from bottom in the Which? 2025 rankings and absolute bottom in 2024. Perhaps the latter partly anticipated the former. Casually saddle a place with derision and it takes a great effort to shake it off.

As the gateway to the island of Ynys Môn (Anglesey), a university town and former royal capital, Bangor doesn’t need star ratings or hip amenities. The city’s origins stretch back to the founding of a monastery in the early sixth century. A cathedral was later built on the site. For centuries, Bangor was the spiritual and ecclesiastical hub for Gwynedd – a kingdom until the English came a-conquering – but remained a small settlement. Nonetheless, during the first flush of Welsh tourism, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, pleasure steamers from Liverpool brought visitors to see the big church and the wild waters of the Menai Strait.

The boom years came after 1826 with the completion of the Holyhead Road, linking London with Dublin – hitched to the recently created UK by the 1800 Acts of Union. The first major civilian state-funded road building project in Britain since the Roman era, the job was given to Thomas Telford. The road (much of it on the same route as today’s A5) swept through central Bangor, making the former big village a major staging post, and creating the longest high street in Wales. To replace the ferry-shuttles, Telford’s magnificent Menai Suspension Bridge opened in 1826. Two decades later, Robert Stephenson built a tubular bridge to carry the Chester-Holyhead railway across the straits. With communications much improved, Bangor became a proper little port, with shipbuilding, sail making, iron founding, smithing and timber yards, as well as slate yards.

Walk to the natural end of this high street – which turns residential – and you come to the shore, a pier and a large park between neo-Norman Penrhyn Castle and the sea. You don’t have an in-town beach, which might be why some of the raters have a low opinion of Bangor. But the Wales Coast Path and the railway line link Bangor with beaches at Llanfairfechan and Penmaenmawr, eight and 10 miles away respectively. In fact, this might be the best-connected seaside town in the UK, with Eryri national park (Snowdonia), Unesco-listed Caernarfon Castle and Criccieth and the Llŷn peninsula accessible by bus, and of course Anglesey on the doorstep.
Things to see and do: walk the Menai Suspension Bridge, kayaking off Caernarfon, Aber Falls Distillery

Millom, Cumbria

The Cumbrian coast is the most intriguing stretch of littoral in these islands. Backed by the towering, cloud-drawing fells of the national park, the shore is often beneath a blue dome. The towns along it are chapters in British social history. Whitehaven is like a Devon port town without the crowds. Workington is a fascinating ex-industrial town. Nethertown is a hidden hamlet in a spectacular setting.

Millom, at the southern tip of the old county of Cumberland, is a stop on the coast-hugging railway line – a superlative train ride – between Barrow-in-Furness and Sellafield. Its main connection to the nexuses of nuclear war and power are the Millomites who commute south and north for work. Millom once had industry; hematite ore (iron oxide) was found at Hodbarrow in 1856 and mined till 1968, the population swelling to 10,000. Much of the land was transformed into an RSPB nature reserve, centred on the north-west’s largest coastal lagoon; little, common and sandwich terns breed on the islands and you can see ringed plovers, redshanks, great crested grebes and oystercatchers around the wetlands.

Millom is tiny, but has none of the jams and crowds of the villages in the nearby Lakes. The Camra-rated Bear on the Square has real ales, good food and live music. The town has its own fell – Black Combe – and while only a 600-metre Marilyn, its isolation and proximity to the sea make it feel higher. The views from the summit are magnificent – with Blackpool Tower and Scafell Pike visible in clear weather.

The poet Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) was born in Millom and spent almost all his life here, shunning metropolitan literary circles and asserting that the much-maligned “provincial” has more in common with people of other times and lands and consequently “may be all the more aware of that which is enduring in life and society”. The titles of his books reflect the locale: Rock Face (1948); The Shadow of Black Combe (1978); Sea to the West (1981). St George’s church has a stained-glass window designed by Christine Boyce that was inspired by Nicholson’s writing. His house is being restored, while Millom as a whole is undergoing a major rebuild with heritage and health projects afoot as well as a 7.5-mile walking and cycling trail.

For a swim, head to Silecroft by train (one stop) or on foot (3.5 miles); Haverigg beach, though closer, often has pollution warnings.
Things to see and do: Millom Heritage and Arts Centre, Swinside Stone Circle

Further information: Visit Scotland, Visit Cumbria and Visit Wales

Ipswich

The place names are tiny poems: Silent Street, where sound was deadened with straw out of respect for convalescing soldiers during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the late 17th century; Smart Street, named after a benevolent merchant and library builder, William Smarte; Star Lane for Stella Maris, Our Lady of the Sea; Franciscan Way, leading to Grey Friars Road, evokes monkish times. Thirteen medieval churches rise above the old town, some in disrepair. Others are renascent: St Mary-le-Tower was recently redesignated as a minster in recognition of its value to the community and its 1,000 years of existence. That’s not so long ago in a town settled very early – perhaps as early as the fifth century, and established by the seventh – by the Anglo-Saxons.

You have to rummage to find historical treasures, which lie scattered, disguised, buried, bullied. The town has one of the best-preserved medieval cores in the country, but local planners wrapped it in roads, houses and, latterly, retail and leisure centres. Things are revealed by walking: the Tooley’s Court almshouses; lemon-hued, half-timbered Curson Lodge; gloriously pargeted Ancient House; an opulent town hall; and an ostentatious former post office on Cornhill, the main square. Seen from between the columns and arches of Lloyds Avenue, it could be Trieste or Venice, minus the overtourism and rip-off cappuccinos.

Erica, from The Friends of the Ipswich Museums, shows me around the mansion in Christchurch Park. Only four families ever lived here – the Withypolls, Devereux, Fonnereaus and Cobbolds – each associated with their times’ trades and trends: Atlantic merchant-adventurers, titled nobles, Huguenot linen traders, brewers and bankers. A standout exhibit is a patinaed oak overmantel rescued from a house on Fore Street that belonged to Thomas Eldred, who sailed round the world with Thomas Cavendish on his 1586-8 circumnavigation. The flagship Desire gave its name to a port on the Patagonian coast. In a corner hangs a portrait of Admiral Edward Vernon, who participated in the War of Jenkins’ Ear between Britain and Spain in the mid-18th century and the capture of Portobelo in Panama; he wore grogram cloth and is thought to have introduced toasts of rum-and-water – or “grog” – to the navy.

Ipswich traded with northern Europe from Saxon times, growing to become a Hanseatic League port, exporting wool and woollen cloth, and importing wine from Bordeaux.

On the harbour front is Isaacs on the Quay, a pub carved out of an old maltings. Behind it, at 80 Fore Street, is – according to Historic England – “the last surviving example of a 15th- to 17th-century Ipswich merchant’s house with warehouses at the rear opening directly on the dock front, where merchandise was unshipped, stored and distributed wholesale or sold retail in the shop on the street front”. The local council considered filling the harbour in to build houses, but a festival in 1971 showed the area could be a place of recreation as well as cultural preservation; the Ipswich Maritime Trust, still very active, grew out of this showdown.
Things to see and do: Willis Building; river cruise on the sailing barge Victor; free A Peep into the Past tour at Christchurch Mansion; Blackfriars monastery ruins

Ramsey, Isle of Man

Travelling overland to Ramsey from Douglas, you have a premonition of how important the sea must once have been. The meandering road and heritage electric railway both scale a mountain on the journey. Doing the trip on foot or horseback must have been hell. The Isle of Man’s longest river, the Sulby, plummets and meanders down from the uplands to meet the sea at Ramsey. Vikings, as well as Scots, entered the Isle of Man here. Its name derives from the Old Norse for “wild garlic river”.

The small working port breaks up a shoreline of sand and pebble beaches backed by apartment buildings and grand-seeming hotels. Timber and aggregate are massed up on the wharves. A bulk carrier called Snaefell River is moored beneath a single tall crane. To the south is the long Queen’s Pier, once a landing stage. Victoria never disembarked, but the pier recalls her visit. Above town is the Albert Tower. The consort made landfall.

Once Ramsey was a popular seaside resort, with Steam Packet ships to Kirkcudbright and Garlieston in Dumfries and Galloway; Liverpool and Whitehaven (I can see the Cumbrian fells). A swing bridge – closed to motorised traffic – connects the northern beach to Ramsey town centre, a likeable mishmash of Victorian buildings housing pubs, food and drink outlets, antique and bric-a-brac shops – and a very 80s strip mall with a Tesco, a drycleaner, a model shop and tattooists.

On the edge of town, I find myself at Grove House, now a museum. It was the holiday home of the island’s second most famous Gibb family. Duncan Gibb was a shipping agent from Greenock. The house reaches out to foreign climes. A tiger skin on the floor of the drawing room. A leopard skin in the bedroom. Mahogany furniture from a primeval forest. Curtains from India. A japanned backgammon set. When the men sailed away or died out, a matriarchy took over.

The Trafalgar pub, on West Quay, must have seen so many deals and binges, squabbles and scuffles. I drink an Odin’s mild in the corner. Locals look bristlingly familiar with one another, conspiratorial, as if they know something I never will.
Things to see and do: Manx Electric Railway to Laxey and Snaefell summit; Ramsey Nature Reserve beach walk; walk up to Albert Tower; the TT

Lancaster

It’s easy not to notice the River Lune or the Lancaster Canal. The former snakes north of the town centre, often behind buildings – supermarkets, an enterprise zone – and is cut off by the city’s notorious roads. The canal sneaks up from the south-west, hopping across the river near a McDonald’s. Anyway, the natural movement here for pedestrians is upward and inland.

The Romans took the high road. Marching through north Lancashire, operating in conjunction with naval transports, they could look out for landing troop detachments. A Roman fort was built on the hill now occupied by Lancaster Castle. It dates from the 12th century, as does the name of Lancashire, and is infamous as the place the Pendle Witches were imprisoned prior to their trial, sentencing and hanging. A small exhibition in a dungeon of the Well Tower recounts the key points of the story, reminding us Jack Straw refused to pardon them in 1998. The castle housed a prison till 2011; its Shire Hall is still used as a courtroom.

Lancaster was once England’s fourth largest slave port, with at least 122 ships sailing to Africa between 1700 and 1800. Local merchants were involved in the capture and sale of around 30,000 enslaved people. Slave-produced goods from the West Indies included sugar, dyes, rice, spices, coffee, rum and, later, cotton for Lancashire’s mills. Fine furniture, gunpowder, clothing and other goods were produced in and around Lancaster and traded in Africa for enslaved people, or sent to the colonies.

The slave trade and abolition trail, revised by Lancaster University professor Alan Rice, takes in churches, with their memorials to merchants who made money from slavery; the Sugarhouse, a nightclub on the site of a former refinery; Gillow’s Warehouse, which imported slave-harvested mahogany to make furniture; and 20 Castle Park, home of the slave-owning Satterthwaite family. On the abolition side are a Friends Meeting House (Quakers were among the earliest opponents of slavery) and, most poignantly, three benches in and near Williamson Park provided by philanthropists for the vagrant poor – including cotton workers laid off during the cotton famine caused by anti-slavery measures taken by Lancashire firms.

The small city of Lancaster, with its university campus and would-be genteel airs, looks and feels innocuous, and altogether unconnected to stormy seas. But it’s the nexus of a significant dark maritime history.
Things to see and do: Ashton Memorial; Maritime Museum; Gallows Hill; Judges’ Lodgings.

Chris Moss’s visits were assisted by Ipswich Central, Visit England, and the Isle of Man government