Quirky Britain – don’t leave home without these books of glorious weirdness

by Roz Morris
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7 books
Britain might be a tiny dot off the corner of Europe, but it packs a lot of delightful strangeness into this tiny space. These books celebrate the eccentric, the ancient, the traditional, the recent, the unknown and the deliciously weird.
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Ben Le Vay's Eccentric Britain

Benedict Le Vay, 2011
I keep a copy of this in my car. My husband and I (I wish that sounded less regal, but there’s no better way to phrase it) like to explore weird little towns off season and this guide would tell us what wonders awaited. A museum devoted to the humble pilchard. A terraced house with a shark sticking out of the roof. Follies and other funny buildings.

Notes from a Small Island

Bill Bryson, 2015
This must be the daddy of all books about quirky Britain. A breezy tour by the American humorist. He puzzles over our place names, our peculiar products like Marmite, eccentrics who build mansions that are half underground, our stoic ability to picnic on inhospitable mountainsides. It’s a glory of peculiarities, told with great affection. Read on a rainy day (there will be one along soon).

Dear Bill Bryson

Footnotes from a Small Island
Ben Aitken, 2022
In which a devoted fan of the Bill Bryson book retraces the Bryson Small Island tour!

The Old Weird Albion

Justin Hopper, 2017
A darker, weirder book, this. The focus is on the English south. Just as personal as Bryson’s odyssey, this is more poetic and evocative, full of myths and mysteries.

Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey

Felicity Cloake, 2022
With all this travel, you’d better keep your strength up. The most important meal of the day is breakfast, right? And Britain’s breakfasts are legendary. We gave our name to the Full English. Felicity Cloake cycles the length and breadth of the country to source the best ingredients (and sometimes sauce them). Seriously, there are whole chapters about the best counties for bacon, black pudding, porridge, omelettes, clootie dumpling. I read it at Christmas, a time for traditional gluttony, and it went down a treat.

Look Here

On the Pleasures of Observing the City
Ana Kinsella, 2022
All around you, there are little stories going on, glimpsed as you ride the bus or Tube, as you walk around, as you wait in a queue. Guys carrying weird things (a long roll of carpet, giant plants), people gathering to swim in the open air ponds on Hampstead Heath. All in the midst of a story, on their way to something, leaving something, sipping a coffee thoughtfully on a bench, talking on a phone. Have you ever thought about that? This book opens your eyes.

Not Quite Lost

Travels Without a Sense of Direction
Roz Morris, 2017
This one’s mine! I’ve spent decades travelling to ordinary places in the UK, and some extraordinary ones, and keeping diaries. My childhood home, with a giant star-gazing telescope on the horizon and a garden path that disappeared under next door's house. A tour guide in Glastonbury who was having a real-life romance with a character from Arthurian legend. A unit on a suburban business park where people were preparing to deep-freeze each other when they die. But even low-key travel has its hazards, and I nearly run down several gentlemen from Porlock when her brakes give up on her. I take my marriage vows in a language I don't speak, have a Strictly-style adventure when I stumble into a job as a flashmob dancer, and hear an unexpected message in an experiment in ESP. Oh, and I also discover the country’s best bacon, and agree wholeheartedly with Felicity Cloake.