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Review: Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out - What a great idea: ignore the queues at the enormous, packed, commercialised tourist trail and write a book celebrating Britain's more obscure and quirky attractions. Unfortunately, the book is not quite up the task. The book is divided into several sections, each one dedicated to one place. The range of places is good, including stone circles, museums, pubs and, er, a nuclear bunker. Some of the places are truly obscure, but some are reasonably well known, such as Avebury (the stone circle, which attracts visitors from around the world), Portmeirion (the Welsh village that is best known as the setting for 60s cult TV classic 'The Prisoner') and Blackgang Chine (one of the best-known tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight, which seems to have been included here primarily because of the coastal erosion that in the past has caused sections of it to fall into the sea). Certainly a good amount of research has gone into the book and it is clearly intended for a wide audience (although you'd think that they'd have given the book a less, well, 'vulgar' title, given that it includes places intended for children). The problem is in the presentation. The book is in the 'small hardback' form that is currently popular (think 'Shott's Original Miscellany' etc) but is printed on fairly low-grade paper so that it feels quite cheap, and it doesn't help the B&W pictures, several of which look indistinct or bleached-out (although this may be intentional and it may vary from copy to copy). The quality of the writing is variable and unfortunately doesn't always do justice to the places described. There's an unfortunate tendency to promote on place only by moaning bitterly about another similar place; this fits in with the theme of the book but it does get tedious after a while. For example, the section about Avebury stone circle could have included more on the history of the place rather than include, as it does, a lengthy whinge about Stonehenge. There also seems to be an implication that the people who go to places like Alton Towers and the like are fools, when they could be visiting the pencil museum instead; I'd like to think that it's possible to enjoy both. This is a tourist guide for those who thought 'Crap Towns' was funny for more than five minutes. It would have been better without the moaning about everything or the endless eulogising of the 'Britishness' of supporting the underdog and so on. Try 'I Never Knew That About England' or one of the other books about Britain's less well-known places instead. |
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