Every country has had its witnesses: travellers, writers, exiles and journalists who crossed it and described it at a particular moment. Reading them today is the most fascinating way to understand what the United Kingdom was like before motorways, mass tourism and globalisation, and to measure how much it has changed. With this section we launch a series of specials devoted to travellers of the past: for each book we describe itineraries, encounters and curiosities, and compare the country described then with the country today, using data and charts.
The first special: Virginia Woolf
The first volume is a little gem: the travel diaries a very young Virginia Woolf, then still Virginia Stephen, wrote between 1905 and 1908 while touring Cornwall, Yorkshire, Norfolk, the New Forest, Sussex, Somerset and Wales. From the pilchard fishery at St Ives to the first Tube reaching the fields of Golders Green, it is a portrait of an England poised between carriages and motor cars. Read the special Virginia Woolf in Britain.
Why read the travellers of the past
Travel accounts are precious historical documents because they record what historians often overlook: the price of an inn, the state of the roads, the food served in taverns, dialects, the habits of ordinary people, astonishment at something new. Travellers notice what those who stay take for granted. Comparing those pages with today's statistics (population, transport, life expectancy, work) makes it possible to tell social history in a concrete and sometimes surprising way.
Other great travellers in the United Kingdom
Travel writing about Britain is vast. Among the classics that described the country in different eras:
- Celia Fiennes, who at the end of the 17th century rode all over England noting towns, mines and gardens.
- Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, with his Tour of the island published between 1724 and 1727, a portrait of a country on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.
- Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, who in 1773 visited the Scottish Hebrides when the Highlands were still a world apart.
- Ugo Foscolo, an exile in London from 1816 until his death, and later Giuseppe Mazzini, who lived in the British capital for many years.
- Hippolyte Taine, who in his Notes on England (1872) described Victorian society with a sociologist's eye.
- J. B. Priestley and George Orwell, who in the 1930s wrote about the industrial cities of the north and the poverty of the Great Depression.
How the specials are built
Each special follows the same pattern: who the traveller was and at what point in life they set off, the stages of the journey, the finest pages retold in our own words, a then-and-now comparison with charts, curiosities and an itinerary for retracing the journey. We do not reproduce the original texts, which deserve to be read in full editions, but we invite readers to discover them.
To place these journeys in their time, see also our history of the United Kingdom and the page on the Industrial Revolution.