WELCOME

This guide is partly inspired by a line in the 1970s-set Ricky Gervais film Cemetery

Junction, where Gervais’s character, responding to his son – who’s agitating for a trip to Paris – says: “Why do you want to go to Paris? There are parts of Reading you haven’t seen.”

In terms of travel abroad and fulfilling the goals we set for ourselves at the start of the year, it’s an understatement to say that 2020 hasn’t lived up to expectations. Trips with friends to the Alps may have been cancelled, your entry to a big sportive or gran fondo deferred until 2021... You can either be downbeat about that or see it not as a problem, but as an opportunity. Though this guide doesn’t venture into Reading, over the next 23 pages we profile some of the best destinations, routes and climbs that Britain has to offer: from top to bottom, John O’Groats to Land’s End, the Scottish Highlands to the Surrey Hills. There’s so much of Britain you won’t have seen yet.