Book Lovers Bucket List

Start with Chaucer, Dickens, Blake and Larkin in Westminster Abbey. Hop on a bus through Zadie Smith's North London or spend an afternoon at Colliers Wood Nature Reserve in Nottinghamshire and look at the lake "all grey and visionary, stretching into the moist, translucent vista of trees and meadow" that D. H. Lawrence described in Women in Love. Come back to London to walk along Monica Ali's Brick Lane and try to push a trolley through the wall of Platform 93/4 at King's Cross Station. From the Brontë parsonage in Haworth to Waugh's Castle Howard; from Beatrix Potter's Lake District, Shakespeare's Stratford and Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh, there are gardens, monuments, museums, churches and a surprising quantity of stained glass. There are walks both urban and rural, where you can explore real landscapes or imaginary haberdasher's shops. There's the club where Buck's Fizz was invented and a pub where you can eat Sherlock's Steak & Ale Pie. And there's a railway station where you can stroke the muzzle of one of the world's most famous and endearing bears.