Something that seemed popular on Bluesky last week was Sophie Stone’s UK Travel Visualiser. There’s a map of the UK (plus the Isle of Man) showing each county, and you can select each one to mark whether you’ve lived there, stayed over, visited, stopped or passed through. I’ve uploaded an excerpt of mine above, and included the full image below (converted from SVG to PNG because I can’t be bothered amending the WordPress config file to enable SVG uploads).
Here’s a text based breakdown for the counties I have visited:
Counties I have lived in
Just two: North Yorkshire and West Yorkshire. I was born in York, in North Yorkshire, and then moved to Bradford in West Yorkshire when I was 18. Then, when Christine and I decided to move in together in 2010, we moved to Sowerby Bridge, also in West Yorkshire, where we still live now. Christine meanwhile has also lived in Lancashire and Derbyshire.
Counties I have stayed in
I’ve interpreted this as ‘counties where I have stayed overnight for at least one night’. There are a lot more of these:
- Berkshire – last visited in 2021 when we stayed in Slough, ahead of a trip to Legoland Windsor.
- Bristol – I last visited for work in 2014, which involved a couple of overnight stays.
- Cheshire – an overnight stay in Chester in 2012 with Christine, marking a year since we got engaged.
- Cumbria – lots of hiking trips to the Lake District, but I think our most recent stay was with a friend from university who has now settled in Kirkby Lonsdale.
- Derbyshire – another hiking trip, this time to Dovedale in 2009.
- Durham – we stayed overnight to attend a wedding in 2016.
- East Riding of Yorkshire – my grandparents lived in the East Riding and so stayed over many times in the past.
- East Sussex – on holiday in 2021.
- Greater London – I last stayed over last year, however Christine has been more recently.
- Greater Manchester – before I could drive, we used to stay over in Manchester after various music gigs. The last time was in 2014, when we saw Delain and Within Temptation at the O2 Apollo. Also spent a couple of nights there for a stag do in 2015.
- Hampshire – we’ve stayed over at the Travelodge by Portsmouth Ferry Terminal a few times on the way back from France, most recently in 2023. Also that year, we spent an afternoon in Southsea.
- Herefordshire – way back in the late 1990s, I went on a week-long PGL holiday near Ross-on-Wye.
- Hertfordshire – another overnight stay for a wedding, this time in 2013, in Stevenage.
- Kent – though we visited Kent in 2021, we stayed in East Sussex. The last time I stayed overnight in Kent was in 2000, on a short break ahead of a few days in the Pas-de-Calais region of France.
- Lancashire – Christine lived here when I met her, and so I stayed overnight a few times during 2009 and 2010 before we moved in together.
- Leicestershire – another overnight stay for a wedding, this time in 2018. The wedding was at the National Space Centre in Leicester, incidentally.
- Lincolnshire – I had a few days in Lincoln with my parents in 2001.
- Merseyside – shortly before the lockdown in 2020, we had a couple of nights in Runcorn as it was handy for Chester Zoo. Before that, we had an overnight stay in 2016, and our last visit was a day trip to Wirral and Liverpool last year.
- Norfolk – last visited in March for Sci-Fi Weekender.
- Northumberland – last year’s holiday.
- Nottinghamshire – my grandparents used to have a canal boat based out of Nottingham marina, and we stayed overnight on it a few times in the 1990s.
- Oxfordshire – most recently in 2018, on the way back from our holiday. We have family there, and will be back there later this summer.
- South Yorkshire – stayed overnight in Sheffield in 2019 when attending a previous Sci-Fi Weekender.
- Staffordshire – again, I have relatives here but our last overnight stay was in 2015 – once again, for a wedding.
- Surrey – stayed overnight as part of our 2023 holiday.
- Tyne and Wear – our most recent trip away was last weekend, when we stayed overnight in Gateshead to visit Beamish. Even though Beamish itself is in County Durham.
- Warwickshire – spent a night in a hotel in 2019, so we could visit Warwick Castle.
- West Midlands – not a wedding, but a stag do in 2013.
- Worcestershire – my ex-girlfriend Hari had family on Worcestershire, so spent some time there up until 2008.
- Edinburgh – last visited in 2011 when we stayed for a few nights. Well overdue for another visit.
- Clwyd – another hiking trip, this time in 2009. We’ll be back there for our summer holiday next month. Also passed through in 2018 on the way to…
- Gwynedd – our first Sci-Fi Weekender was near Pwllheli in 2018, which was the last one to be hosted there.
- Isle of Man – technically the Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency and not officially part of the United Kingdom, but it’s on the map. Christine and I had our first holiday as a couple there in 2010.
- Fife – one of my mum’s university friends lives in Fife and so I’ve been a few times. Our most recent visit was in 2015, and, in what is becoming a theme, it was for a wedding.
- Perth and Kinross – very early in our relationship, Christine and I joined two other couples on a long weekend near Callander in Perthshire, in early 2010.
Counties I have visited
This is a much smaller list of places where I have intentionally gone to on a day trip:
- Cambridgeshire – I’ve been to Cambridge once, for a meetup with other editors at the Open Directory Project, back in 2003.
- Shropshire and Powys – as mentioned, I have family in Staffordshire and so I’ve been to Shropshire and Powys before on day trips – just not very recently.
- South Glamorgan – I went on a demonstration against tuition fees in Cardiff in 2004. To date, it’s still my one and only visit to the Welsh capital.
- Lanarkshire – I’ve also only made it to Glasgow once, in November 2009. I met up with several people in my World of Warcraft guild, including Hari – we had split up earlier that year and this was the first time we’d seen each other since. I’d first met Christine a few weeks before.
Counties I have stopped off in
- Essex – literally just at Birchanger Green services on the M11.
- East Sussex – part of Gatwick Airport is in East Sussex and so I would have been there very briefly in 1999.
Counties I have passed through
- Devon, Somerset and Dorset – in the 1990s, when on holiday with my parents, we came back via Poole and Plymouth on occasion and so will have passed through these counties. But I haven’t visited them properly.
- Gwent – on the way to Cardiff in 2004.
- Rutland, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire – these are places I have driven through, but never visited. Christine has recently reconnected with some of her family in Milton Keynes, so Buckinghamshire may rise up the list in future.
- Berwickshire, West Lothian, Midlothian, East Lothian. These are all counties that we passed through on our way to Fife in 2015.
- Dumfries, Dumbartonshire, Stirling & Falkirk. Similarly, we passed through these in 2010 on the way to Callander.
Counties I’ve never been to
I’m not going to list them all, but this includes large parts of Scotland, mid Wales, and the whole of Northern Ireland. We’d like to go to Cornwall at some point, but it’s a very long way from where we are in Northern England. There’s a reason why there’s still a sleeper train from London to Penzance. Our nine-year-old has also expressed an interest in seeing the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland at some point.
How many points?
The UK Travel Visualiser also awards points – the longer you’ve spent in a county, the more points you get. I managed 184 points – not bad, but it would have been higher if I had lived in more places. Diamond Geezer managed 241, by virtue of having lived in more places, and being 19 years my senior.
