Help! First trip to UK
 

We are flying to Manchester June 28 and returning July 11. It's our first trip to England. We are planning to base ourselves in Oxford or Bath and see those cities and Stonehenge, etc. We are a Mom, Dad, early 20's child and an 11 yr old. One of us is an architect and wants to see buildings. All of us want a relaxed vacation.

What can you suggest for places to stay, ways to get around, what to see? Many thanks!

What made you choose Oxford and Bath--the variety of buildings, the history? Does London interest you? Besides sightseeing, what would you like to do? We need some clues.

Like the one of you, I too am an architect and also like you, our first visit to the UK (10 years ago and 4 more visits afterward) was by way of Manchester.

You're in for a treat!

Are you renting a car? I hope so. Do you have the Michelin Motoring Atlas?

We enjoyed staying in small B&Bs and interacting with the hosts. The towns, villages and countryside of the West Midlands are so scenic.

Using resources such as "English Villages" and the like, I created an itinerary that had us connecting the dots, so to speak. I suggest you do a lot of research before you leave home.

We need to know more to be able to give you useful advice. Just being an architect -- interested in cutting edge modern, or Georgian, or Victorian industrial, or Roman engineering, or Jacobean, or, or??

And you say you want a relaxed vacation - but have chosen two bustling cities. Bath and Oxford are wonderful places - but a few days in the countryside would be more restful/relaxed.

Also - it sounds like you don't plan on any time in London - right? Is your return flight also out of Manchester?

You can't base yourselves in cities like Oxford or Bath and have a relaxed holiday. If you've not driven here before, it's very, very unlikely that you'll regard even the act of driving in and out of town each day as relaxing.

Even if you base yourself in a smaller nearby town, it's hard to believe dealing with our roads every day would be most people's idea of relaxation.

Two weeks' driving round middle England can be phenomenally enjoyable. Doing so from a base as cosmopolitan and bustling as Oxford can even be stimulating.

But if all of you want a quiet time, you really need to rethink your strategy.

Rent a rural cottage, for example, and assume you're going to be spending at least 4-5 days just pottering round England's three most priceless assets: our networks of public-access footpaths, medieval churches and village pubs (the single major reason for the survival of these paths has been to enable us to walk from our rural homes to other people's churches and pubs).

Then, relaxed, spend a week tackling our just slightly less medieval road system to catch up on Bath, Avebury (as well as, or instead of, Stonehenge), Oxford et al. Or accept that you all have slightly different levels of interest in relaxation, and split your activities accordingly. In which case, you might like to base yourselves somewhere smallish with reasonable public transport, so some can drive while others train or bus. From towns on the Cotswold line, for example (www.clpg.co.uk)

The architect, by the way, mustn't rely on mass market guides like the Blue Guide or Michelin. I'd invest in the Pevsner guide to Oxfordshire and its two guides to Gloucestershire (www.pevsner.co.uk). Or at the very least, get to a decent library, allowing a full day to work your way through the three.

We have a modest record in this part of the world for reasonable recent buildings, as well as the better-known monuments that get into the big guides: we also have an outstanding record of 500 years' domestic architecture. Anyone really interested in buildings could easily spend days just meandering, Pevsner in hand, round a town like Burford or Cirencester.

The architect would do well to spend a day or two in Manchester itself - there's a couple of new landmark buildings (the Lowry Centre and the Imperial War Museum North), and plenty of gothic Victorian sights, including the town hall and the John Rylands Library.

For the more general advice, CotswoldScouser is talking a lot of sense!

CotswoldScouser recommendation of the Pevsner Guides is really good - I was going to mention them last night but had a brain cramp and couldn't remember the name. This morning I logged in to add the info, and there was CS' post.

W/ the info from CS and the rest of us - you probably have a bit of a better idea what you might like to do.

So give us the add'l info - Flying home from Manchester? Going to/staying in London? Driving or using public transport? Type(s) of arcitectural interest? -- then we can help you w/ a reasonable itinerary and places to stay.