About ten years ago, I adopted a tradition of “Friday rambles” during our visits to England. Typically, I get on a train and head off to explore some destination outside of Oxfordshire, so that I see more of the country outside of our summer home in Oxford. In 2024, having realizedrealised that I was getting close to having visited all 47 English counties, I decided to complete my list. You can click on a county to see where I’ve gone over the years.

A mathematical aside: In 1852, the British mathematician Francis Guthrie was trying to colorcolour the counties of England so that no two counties that share a border would have the same colorcolour. Guthrie conjectured that four colorscolours—as shown by the map on this page—would be sufficient to colorcolour not just the English counties, but any map on the plane. Although many “proofs” were published over the years and later found to be flawed, the Four ColorColour Theorem remained unproven until 1976 when Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken used extensive computer analysis to resolve the question.

• Luton

  Luton is the largest urban center in England that does not yet have city status. It is home to a large Pakistani community, which I knew from the movie Blinded by the Light and the memoir Live from Bury Park on which the film is based. Several summers ago, I was making dinner for several Young Adult Friends, including a Pakistani student at Oxford, so I decided to go to Luton to buy the necessary ingredients in a shop where most people were speaking Urdu. At the Oxford Rail station, I asked the ticket agent for a “day return to Luton.” The agent seemed puzzled until we both realizedrealised that I was looking for a ticket to Luton Central rather than Luton Airport, which is the only destination most people in Oxford know (and customers rarely buy “day returns” to an airport).

• Reading

  Reading is home to Emma Schofield and her son Alex, who are our best friends in England outside of Oxford. In her day job, Emma is a research chemist, but we know her best as an as-yet-unpublished fantasy novelist who has written many amazing stories, of which our favoritefavourite is The Nature of Shadow focusing on a young woman at a school of wizardry—a book that Emma started writing long before the Harry Potter series appeared.

• Newbury

  Newbury is home to the Watermill Theatre, which is one of the better regional theatres between Oxford and London.

• Bristol

  Bristol is the main port city on the Bristol Channel near the mouth of the Severn River. On my visit several years ago, I came upon an old Quaker graveyard not far from the town center, dating from the time when Quakers could not be buried in Church of England grounds.

• Milton Keynes

  Milton Keynes is home to Britain’s Open University, where I’ve had a few collaborators. It is also one of four cities in which I saw the 2019 touring production of Hair celebrating its 50th anniversary.

• Bletchley

  During World War II, Bletchley Park was home to GCCS, the top-secret Government Code and Cipher School charged with breaking the German Enigma code. The site now hosts an excellent museum to which I twice took students from my Stanford in Oxford classes.

• Ickford

  Ickford is certainly off the beaten track and is included in this list only because that’s where I went the only time I walked out of Oxfordshire. I knew that they wouldn’t have postcards, so I made one of the general store and post office before I left and then sent the card from that exact spot.

• High Wycombe

  High Wycombe was my first destination after deciding that Friday rambles had to take me out of Oxfordshire. I wandered around the town and ate dinner at a reasonably good Indian restaurant, but the town did not seem exciting enough for a return visit.

• Cambridge

  I try to visit Cambridge at least once every few years and have explored both the city and its surroundings during that time. My impression is that it is more of an academic center than Oxford, partly because it’s marginally less prestigous. The streets in Cambridge seem full of university students, while the streets in Oxford are overrun by younger visitors from all over whose parents have sent them to Oxford almost as if it were a summer camp.

• Ely

  Ely is most famous for its cathedral, which dates from the 11th century. When I visited in 2024, Ely Cathedral featured a display of larger-than-life sculptures scattered around the grounds, which I thought were extremely well done.

• Crewe

  Cheshire was one of the last counties I visited, and I picked Crewe as my destination mostly because it was easier to reach. Crewe is an industrial city that has, like much of northern England, fallen on hard times. I walked to Queen’s Park, which is shown in this postcard I made from an image on the web.

• Lands End

  Lands End is the westernmost point in England and the starting point for the Lands End to John O’Groats long-distance path. I walked from Penzance to Lands End along the South West Coast Path, which took much longer than I expected, given all the ins, outs, ups, and downs.

• Minack Theatre

  The Minack Theatre is carved into the cliffside at the southern tip of the Penwith Peninsula overlooking the English Channel. Lauren and I saw a staging of Philip Pullman’s fantasy His Dark Materials there.

• Penzance

  As a lifelong Gilbert and Sullivan fan, I had to visit Penzance, even though I saw no pirates in my short visit on my walk to Lands End. The poster on the right for the initial performance reflects the complexity of copyright in the 19th century. New plays were sometimes performed once in England with little or no preannouncement to avoid the work being “pirated” before approved productions could be staged in other countries.

• St Ives

  When Lauren and I spent a week in Cornwall several years ago, we stayed in St Ives, exploring the town, visiting the Barbara Hepworth and Tate St Ives museums, and walking on the beach, carefully guarding any food in our hands from diving seagulls.

The county of Cumbria is most closely associated with the scenic areas collectively known as the Lake District. Lauren and I spent five days in the Lake District in the early 1990s, well before we started spending our summers in Oxford. In contrast to my more recent Friday rambles, all of which use trains and buses, we hired a car for our trip to the Lake District, which gave us considerably more flexibility.

• Ambleside

  We stayed in Ambleside for most of our time in the Lake District, making day trips from there. One of our lasting memories was watching sheep dogs control their flocks, making all the moves we recognizedrecognised from watching the movie Babe.

• Kendal

  Kendal is home to the Quaker Tapestries, a collection of embroidered panels featuring scenes from the history of Quaker work for peace and social justice.

• Eyam

  I visited Eyam (pronounced eem) after reading Geraldine Brooks’s 2001 novel Year of Wonders, which tells how the residents of Eyam kept a plague outbreak from spreading by isolating themselves in their small community.

• Buxton

  Each summer, Buxton hosts the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, at which both professional and amateur theatre companies put on G&S productions at the Buxton Opera House. We have twice seen our American friend Kay Byler there, in Yeoman of the Guard in 2013 and in The Mikado in 2024.

• Axminster

  I had lunch in Axminster on my way to Lyme Regis several years ago, so this is perhaps my most tenuous county visit. There is a lot more of Devon to see in future years.

• Lyme Regis

  Lyme Regis is the town most associated with the Jurassic Coast, where the 19th century amateur naturalist Mary Anning discovered and catalogued hundreds of dinosaur fossils, including giant ammonites of the type shown here.

• West Bay

  West Bay is about ten miles east of Lyme Regis along the Dorset Coast. England was in the midst of a heat wave when I visited that area, so I got up at 4:00am to walk along the coast path before the temperature became uncomfortable. West Bay was the location for the British detective series Broadchurch starring David Tennant and Olivia Colman, and I enjoyed seeing the amazing cliffs that featured so prominently in the show.

• Durham

  Durham is known primarily for its cathedral, which dates from the 11th and 12th centuries, and for its university, which is one of the top-rated Russell Group universities in England (this year in fifth place after Cambridge, Oxford, LSE, and Imperial). Durham Cathedral was also used as one of the Hogwarts locations in the first two Harry Potter films. On my visit, I was particularly taken with the Josef Pyrz sculpture of Mary, which seemed to offer a much more inclusive vision of the divine than one often sees.

• Hull

  I visited Hull to see the Wilberforce Museum, which celebrates the work of the 18th century abolitionist William Wilberforce who led the campaign to abolish Britain’s slave trade. A statue of Wilberforce stands on a tall column overlooking the city of Hull, which seems much more appropriate than celebrating an admiral, as Trafalgar Square does. Hull also has a long history of laborlabour activism led by its dockworkers.

• Brighton

  Brighton is the largest seaside city in the county and for years has been a hotbed of progressive activity, electing the first Green Party MP in 2010, which has now risen to four MPs as of the 2024 election. I once gave a keynote at a computer science conference here on a whirlwind trip from California.

• Hastings

  Hastings is famous as the site of William the Conqueror’s landing in 1066, but the motivation for my visit was the excellent British television series Foyle’s War, set in Hastings during and after World War II.

• Poohsticks bridge

  On one of our few driving trips through England, we made a pilgrimage to the bridge made famous by A. A. Milne in The House at Pooh Corner (“In which Pooh invents a new game, and Eeyore joins in”). We played Poohsticks, of course, which together with the sticks contributed by other visitors requires the park to clear out the accumulated debris every month. In our game, Cranberry won.

• Manningtree

  Manningtree is the closest National Rail station to East Bergholt, just across the Essex-Suffolk border. On my visit in 2024, I walked the four miles from the station via Flatford to Old Hall in East Bergholt. On the way, I passed about ten people, each of whom wished me good morning.

The Cotswolds are England’s largest designated National Landscape and extend from the western parts of Oxfordshire into Gloucester, rising from the Thames Valley up to the top of a limestone escarpment overlooking the Severn. Over the years, I’ve visited several of the more picturesque towns in the Cotswolds, including Cheltenham, Chipping Norton, Lechlade, Moreton-in-Marsh, Stow-on-the-Wold, and Witney. I’ve expanded below some of my favoritefavourite stories from the county.

• Chipping Campden

  One of my longtime friends from Harvard is Nick Horton, with whom I share many passions including computing, Quakerism, and juggling. Nick’s mother is English and lives in Chipping Campden. One summer, Nick invited me to a welcome-home party there, where I was treated to a completely unexpected concert featuring Nick’s late stepfather Bob Wilber (then 87), one of the greatest jazz clarinetists of all time.

• Westonbirt

  Westonbirt is home to England’s National Arboretum, which I heard about in the reminiscences of our dear friend Alan Allport, who was evacuated near there as a child during World War II. In exploring the nearby countryside, Alan discovered this more-than-100-acre wood with magical-looking trees seemingly tended by a man he deemed to be an enchanter. I was similarly enchanted on my visit.

The London region is actually two counties: Greater London covering the larger urban area and the tiny City of London consisting of the area inside the old city walls, now mostly the financial district. I typically visit London several times a summer, mostly to attend theatre events, participate in protest marches, and generally explore the city. Two stories seem worth highlighting:

• Aldwych

  Our first long stay in Oxford coincided with the long build-up to the Iraq War, when everyone knew that the war was coming, but not exactly when. On 15 February 2003, peace activists around the world marched all over the world, including an estimated 2,000,000 people in London. Lauren and I started our march at a Quaker vigil outside the BBC offices in Aldwych, where a circle of about 100 people managed to create a feeling of silence even inside the bustling City of London. We marched from there through Trafalgar Square and then on to Hyde Park.

• Buckingham Palace

  After years of inviting our nieces and nephews, one at a time, to Oxford to spend a week exploring England, we hosted my brother Mark and his wife Eileen in the summer of 2023. On our visit to London, we made the obligatory stop at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Amazingly, King Charles’s motorcade left the gates just as we arrived, and we stood as the King drove by in his limousine, windows down, smiling and waving, no more than 20 meters away. If we’d been a minute earlier or later, we would have missed the whole thing.

• Manchester

  Manchester and its university play an important role in the history of computing. Alan Turing worked as a researcher there after the war and participated in the development of the first stored-program computer, usually referred to as the “Manchester Baby.”

• Watership Down

  On one of my rare car trips about 20 years ago, I drove along the rural roads near the Hampshire village of Ecchinswell to visit the setting for Richard Adams’s classic novel Watership Down. As I discovered when I read it to Lauren, Watership Down is one of the best read-aloud books ever published, both because of the many stories within the main story and because the narrative style reflects so well the mood of the scenes, shifting instantly from slow narrative passages to rapid-fire action whenever danger appears.

• Winchester

  Winchester is best known for its cathedral. Construction of the cathedral began in 1079 and continued for several centuries thereafter. On my visit, I discovered that Jane Austen is buried there.

• Southampton

  Southampton is the main port city on the English Channel, with docking facilities for giant cruise ships, including the Queen Mary II we took to England in 2024. We also took a ferry from Southampton to the Isle of Wight in 2016.

• Hereford

  Hereford is the county town of Herefordshire and the gateway to Hay-on-Wye. The Hereford Cathedral is noted for the Mappa Mundi, an early 14th-century map of the world engraved in stone.

• Hay-on-Wye

  Hay-on-Wye is technically just across the Welsh border from Herefordshire, although the town has an English postcode. In the 1960s, Richard Booth argued that the future of the town depended on developing it as the used-book capital of the world. To that end, he opened a bookstore, now joined by more than two dozen other shops selling both new and used books. Definitely worth a visit.

• Leavesden

  My only visit so far to Hertforshire is to the Warner Brothers studio in Leavesden, which houses the Harry Potter Studio Tour in two sound stages. My visit, booked three months earlier, took place on 24 June 2016 when our niece Delaney Swanson was visiting Oxford. As it happens, Britain had voted to leave the EU the day before. While everyone else we knew was crying in disbelief, Delaney and I spent the day in a magical world entirely separate from the foolishness of Muggles.

• Cowes

  The town of Cowes is the docking port for the ferry from Southampton, but we also visited Osborne House, used as a vacation home by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The home includes memorabilia from Victoria’s period of fascination with India given her role as Empress.

• Totland

  Totland is a small town at the western edge of the Isle of Wight, best known for The Needles, a row of three chalk columns stretching out into the English Channel.

• Sandown

  When I turned 64 in the summer of 2016, we decided to spend a week on the Isle of Wight, inspired by the Beatles’ lyric “we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear.” We rented a room (sadly, not a cottage) in Sandown on the eastern side of the island. We used Sandown as a base for exploration, visiting the Dinosaur Isle museum and the Donkey Sanctuary in Ventnor. When we went out to dinner one evening, the server asked why we had come to the Isle of Wight. After I replied that it was because of the Beatles’ song, she walked away, and, a minute or so later, “When I’m Sixty Four” was playing over the loadspeakers. My guess is that others have come for the same reason.

• Canterbury

  The European Computer Science Education Conference has twice been held at the University of Kent in Canterbury. At the first of these, I took an eight-hour hike from Canterbury to Folkestone along a combination of trails and “B” roads. I remember having the impression that, even in this part of Southeast England, there is so much rural land. I previously had the impression that putting 60,000,000 people onto such a small island would leave little open space. Twenty years later, I’ve come to think of England as a big island that I will never come close to exploring in full.

• Dover

  Dover is known best for its famous White Cliffs rising above the English Channel, which all of Stanford-in-Oxford visited on a field trip in 2003. It is also the entrance to the Channel Tunnel through which he have made many journeys on the Eurostar.

• Folkestone

  Folkestone is a port town on the southern coast of England. My personal interest in Folkestone arises from the fact that my parents were there in 1950 for the conference of the World Student Federalists at which my father was elected president. He always claimed that the reason for his victory was that he knew more Gilbert and Sullivan songs and therefore won the votes of the British delegation, along with the Americans and Swedes.

• Pendle Hill

  After visiting the Lake District in the 1990s, Lauren and I drove south toward Liverpool, stopping at Pendle Hill, which plays an important role in Quaker history. Lancashire is also the home of Margaret Fell, one of George Fox’s early converts and one of the few members of the landed gentry to join the faith. The Fell estate was called Swarthmoor Hall and became the leading center of Quaker activity in its early years. Ten years after she was widowed, Margaret Fell and George Fox married and today are considered the co-founders of Quakerism.

• Loughborough

  One of the most interesting people I met through the Oxford Quaker Meeting was David Patterson, who had been the vicar of St Peter’s Church in Loughborough until he decided he could no longer believe in the God of the Anglican Church. I attended his extremely moving memorial service in Loughborough, where speakers representing many different faiths spoke of all that they had learned from David over the years.

• Stamford

  Stamford is in the southwest corner of Lincolnshire, and represents little more than a footstep into the county. I asked about vegetarian restaurants at the tourist information bureau and was directed to a lovely hole-in-the-wall cafe I would never have found on my own.

• Liverpool

  Lauren and I visited Liverpool on our trip to the Lake District in the 1990s. We returned our rental car there and boarded a ferry to Dublin. I returned to Liverpool a decade later for a computer science conference, when I had more of a chance to explore the musical history of the Beatles’ hometown.

• Norwich

  From medieval times up to the industrial revolution, Norwich was one of England’s largest cities, second only to London, although it has suffered from challenging economic competition in more recent times. In my visit in 2024, I wandered around the town a bit before heading off to the Norfolk coast.

• Great Yarmouth

  I stayed at a seaside bed-and-breakfast in Great Yarmouth before heading south along the Norfolk Coast Path, walking into a very stiff wind that sometimes made progress hard.

• Gorleston-on-Sea

  My most important destination in Norfolk was Gorleston-on-Sea, which was one of the main filming locations for 2019 movie Yesterday, which we both loved. Director Danny Boyle sent location scouts out to explore many such hotels, looking for one with a flat roof on which to stage the concert that represents the climax of the story. They found what they were looking for in the Pier Hotel, where the manager gave me a tour of the building and told various stories about the filming. Interestingly, Boyle considered the interior of the hotel too posh for his vision, so those scenes were all filmed elsewhere.

• York

  York is best known for its cathedral, which is called York Minster, a term dating back to the Anglo-Saxon period in which the original church was built. I spent only a few hours in York, so my explorations took in little beyond the cathedral and the surrounding buildings.

• Northampton

  Northamptonshire was the last county I visited, and I spent several hours in Northampton itself. Unlike many of the more out-of-the-way places, I did find postcards in Northampton, although none in any shops or the tourist bureau, which instead sent me to the public library, where I found a good selection.

• Heddon-on-the-Wall

  I took a bus from Newcastle upon Tyne to the village of Heddon-on-the-Wall, just over the Northumberland county line. The ruins of Hadrian’s Wall, built in the second century to separate Roman England from hostile tribes in Scotland, are visible in several parts of Heddon-on-the-Wall. Hadrian’s Wall Path runs 84 miles through Cumbria and Northumberland and would make a good long-distance hike in some future summer.

• Nottingham

  In 2004, I gave a keynote talk on “Teaching the Psychology of Debugging” at the Psychology of Programming Conference at the University of Nottingham. I did a bit of wandering but caught no sign of Sherwood Forest or Nottingham’s famous sheriff.

Oxford is our home base when we spend our summers in England, and we’ve been too many places in the county to list them all. Three views inside the city seemed worth a picture, which you will find later on this page. Outside of the city limits, I’ve visited Abingdon, Banbury, Bicester, Chipping Norton, Didcot, Eynsham, Faringdon, Kidlington, Islip, Uffington, Witney, and Woodstock.

• The Bodleian Library

  The picture on the right is probably the most iconic image of Oxford University. The building in the picture is the Radcliffe Camera, which is a tiny part of Oxford’s 500-year-old Bodleian library. We’ve had Bodleian cards since we taught at Stanford in Oxford more than twenty years ago, which give us access not only to the library, but also to most of the Oxford Colleges.

• Oxford Friends Meeting

  Most of the people we know in Oxford are part of the Oxford Meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers), to which Eric transferred his membership after leaving Palo Alto. We love the many people we have met there and, in particular, the fact that so many of those people are capable of carrying on fascinating conversations about a wide range of topics: poetry, art, music, literature, theatre, films, science, and world affairs.

• The Eagle and Child

  This pub, often known to locals as “The Bird and Baby” because of its sign, is famous as the meetingplace of The Inklings, a group of fantasy writers including both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Although the pub closed at the time of the pandemic, there are rumorsrumours that its new owners will reopen it next year.

• Rutland Water

  My primary destination in Rutland was Rutland Water, the largest reservoir in England (at least by surface area), completed in 1975. The western edge of the reservoir is part of a large nature reserve, which includes the Anglian Bird Watching Centre. The reservoir is home to many waterbirds, including over 200 osprey, which had disappeared from England as a breeding bird in the 1840s.

• Oakham

  Although I had not expected to find much of interest in Rutland beyond the reservoir, I enjoyed my visit to the town of Oakham. I happened upon this blue plaque honoring “smallest man from the smallest county” in England.

• Shrewsbury

  Shrewsbury is a lovely Shropshire town best known for its castle, its abbey dating from Saxon times, and as the home of Charles Darwin, whose history is celebrated in several parts of the town.

• Bath

  Lauren and I had a lovely excursion to Bath several years ago, where we visited the Roman ruins and wandered in the footsteps of Jane Austen.

• Sheffield

  I’ve made several excursions to Sheffield over the years, where we have friends that we met in Oxford years before. Sheffield is also the setting for both The Full Monty and the Jodie Whittaker seasons of Doctor Who, which means there is some familiar scenery in the area.

• Stafford

  Although I had passed through Staffordshire on the train at least a dozen times over the years, I had never gotten off at any of its cities until 2024. The county town of Stafford has an attractive park near the rail station that I enjoyed exploring.

• East Bergholt

  Fiona Mullins, one of our friends of many years in Oxford moved three years ago to the Old Hall Community in East Bergholt, an intentional community with about 50 adults and 20 children housed in a former convent on 60 acres of land. East Bergholt is a short walk from Flatford, where John Constable did most of his paintings.

• Hampton Court Palace

  According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest surviving hedge maze was planted in 1690 during the reign of William and Mary on the grounds of the Hampton Court Palace. The maze has a path length of approximately half a mile. Although the palace itself is in the Greater London borough of Richmond, much of the grounds are in the Surrey village of East Molesey.

• Guildford

  For me (as perhaps for most science-fiction reading Americans), Guildford is best known from its mention in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that it is not actually the home of Arthur Dent’s friend Ford Prefect. (“How would you react if I told you I’m not from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?”). The centercentre of the city is occupied by Guildford Castle, which dates from the time of William the Conquerer. I really enjoyed looking at the sculptured gardens on the castle grounds.

• Newcastle

  Tyne and Wear is a small county centered on two rivers, dominated by the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. While there, I looked at the many bridges crossing the river and wandered a bit around the university before taking a bus out to see Hadrian’s Wall.

• Stratford-upon-Avon

  Every few years, we make a trip up to Stratford-upon-Avon to see something playing at the theatres there. As with the Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon, most of what we’ve seen in Stratford was written by Shakespeare, but we’ve also seen other productions, including a reduced-cast version of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in which the two lead actors randomly determined who would play Faust and who would play Mephistopheles for that performance.

• Birmingham

  Birmingham is the second-largest city in England, historically with a large industrial economy. It is also important in the history of Quakerism, largely because of the Cadbury family, which along with two other Quaker families (the Rowntrees and the Frys) dominated the chocolate business in the 18th and 19th centuries. In addition to allowing the families to avoid taking part in the arms industry, all three companies sought to ensure that workers were treated fairly. The Cadburys, for example, created the model village of Bournville for their workers, building schools and recreation areas that treated men and women equally.

• Coventry

  Coventry is famous for its cathedral, which was largely destroyed by German bombing in World War II. Rather than replace the old cathedral, Coventry built a new, more modern cathedral next to the ruins of the old, leaving it in place as a monument against war.

• Wolverhampton

  I went to Wolverhampton to catch a performance of the 50th-anniversary touring production of Hair, which was just as wonderful there as in the three other cities in which I caught performances.

• Horsham

  I took the train to Horsham to visit the Knepp Estate, Britain’s best-known rewilding project, which is featured in the 2023 documentary Wilding, which is well worth watching.

• Leeds

  I’ve been to two computer science education conferences in Leeds over the years, both of which were held at the university.

• Swindon

  My first trip to Swindon was to visit the offices of the British Computer Society, which is based there. Since then, I’ve also visited the rail museum. Oddly, the Swindon rail station makes no mention of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, much of which takes place there.

• Salisbury

  Salisbury Cathedral is a popular tourist destination, both because of the cathedral architecture itself and because it is a repository of a copy of the Magna Carta.

• Avebury

  Avebury is home to the a Neolithic stone circle larger and older than the more famous Stonehenge site 25 miles to the south.

• Stonehenge

  Stonehenge is one of the most famous landmarks in England, located on the Salisbury plain near Amesbury.

• Evesham

  I made a day trip to Evesham several summers ago and visited Abbey Park, which presents the history of Evesham and its abbey. The county is definitely due for further visits.