“Away from the rollercoasters and ghastly plush mascots, in the corners that corporate branding and market‐centred focus research groups forgot, Britain maintains a wealth of eccentric and wonderful tourist attractions” (jacket). This delightful pocket‐sized guide describes 45 of these little‐known attractions away from the mainstream tourist magnets. “You've been working hard all week. It's your day off. Why waste hours of it standing up to your ankles in candyfloss and sick in some endless park queue? After all, there's a little brown sign hidden in the hedgerows and it points to somewhere far less obvious. Somewhere far from the sodding crowd” (Jacket).
This book is a follow‐up of the authors' hugely successful Bollocks to Alton Towers (Halstead et al., 2006). From the Margate Shell Grotto, Lincolnshire's Bubble Car Museum, and Clark's Shoe Museum in Street (Somerset), to London's Cartoon Museum, the National Gas Museum in Leicester, and the Port Logan Fish Pond, the authors describe – characterise would be more accurate – a wide range of the curious, the eccentric and the off‐beat. Not all the entries are to museums: Brownsea Island (of Scout movement fame), the disappearing village of Dunwich, and the (disputed) Centre of Britain, also feature as places to visit. But this is no ordinary guidebook. Addresses, web sites and contact details are given, and a map indicates location, but the prose descriptions, typically five or six pages for each attraction, provide a marvellous commentary on the spirit and idiosyncrasies of these unusual places. The prose is both witty and empathetic, and the accounts well researched. An account of the complexities of the successor companies of British Gas (in the entry on the National Gas Museum) had me both laughing and admiring the depth of research; the instructions on how to make a proper cup of tea (Bramah Museum of Tea and Coffee) recalled grandma warming the best china; and the authors' efforts to paddle a coracle at the National Coracle Centre was definitely Jerome K. Jerome‐ish (Three Men in A Boat).
Photographs (rather small and grey) illustrate all the entries. The book is indexed and contains a bibliography (with sources ranging from The Golden Bough to Winnie the Pooh, and the Monopolies and Merger Commission to The Collected Dorothy Parker!) Although the sparkling prose is not quite what one would expect on the reference shelves, where else would one so conveniently and amusingly find details of the Yelverton Paperweight Centre, the Fan Museum, the Bovington Tank Museum, Fitzpatrick's Temperance Bar, and the Poldark Tin Mine? I'm all for reference books that make you laugh! And cry. The final entry is for a vanished pair of legs! Overlooking the Solway Firth stood the legs from a sixty‐foot human effigy made from fence panels for the film of Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man. Or they were when the book was written. By the proof stage, they had been stolen! But the other 44 attractions remain … so far, but don't delay!
