From Plymouth to Edinburgh: a walker?s guide to six British cities

It’s a truism that so many of Britain’s high streets look alike, but often, a few steps away from the main shopping areas the particular character of a town or city can still be discerned. Manchester is ringed by canals and railways built in the 18th and 19th centuries. Liverpool slopes down to the sea via streets lined with old shipping agents’ offices and chandlers’ workshops. In Edinburgh you just have to look up and around to see history bursting out of the bedrock. We still tend to think Paris owns flâneur-ing - the art of strolling and observing urban life. But wandering our cities and towns is just as rewarding - here are six of our favourites.

The decline of a port city offloads more ghosts of lost grandeur than you’ll find in any inland metropolis. It’s impossible, almost, to imagine Liverpool as the second city of empire, the busiest port in the world, the gateway to America. The Mersey, brown-grey and sluggish, is mostly empty these days, crossed only by commuter and tourist ferries, occasional boats from Ireland and oversized cruise vessels. And yet, the river does still draw people to its edge; many of Liverpool’s most important streets end up there. The famous Three Graces and Albert Dock are almost too big to admire, unless you’re actually on the river, but, as Unesco notes, no fewer than 380 of the city’s buildings are of historic value. World heritage status might have gone but the maritime mercantile past is still everywhere.

My favourite landmarks include the Portland stone and redbrick Albion House, former HQ of the White Star Line, on James Street; the tug-shaped Baltic Fleet pub; the British and Foreign Marine Insurance Company Building, on Castle Street, with its marine-themed mosaics; the Victorian buildings of Water Street and Dale Street and their shadowy alleyways and cross-streets; the Western Approaches museum on Rumford Street, of a second world war operations room (there’s no map like a naval map); and Regent Road, with its tobacco warehouse and the last few “unregenerated” wharves - go soon, as development is coming. The sea and its stories are everywhere; there’s even a porthole in the ground outside John Lewis, where you can peer down to the Old Dock, built by pioneering civil engineer Thomas Steers in 1709-1715. Online there are countless maps and resources to chart a sea-themed walk, but why not explore Liverpool like a lost ship, heading this way and that and looking out for hints and names and connections?

An “ugly, lovely” place to Dylan Thomas; a “pretty shitty” one to Terry Walsh in Kevin Allen’s 1997 comedy caper Twin Town. Wales’ second city is both of these things, as is starkly obvious when you glance along the sweepingly curvaceous front and glistening sea, and then turn round to gawp at the ranks of dead-eyed pebble-dashed terraces swarming the surrounding hillsides. The Lexuses and electric BMWs take the coast road to the Gower; the modified old bangers still bounce around Townhill.

To cut a poetic line through the sprawl, you could do worse than explore a few Dylan-linked places: Cwmdonkin Park (The Hunchback in the Park) is small and bosky; 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, his birthplace and now a museum, is on an utterly bourgeois street in the Uplands district; the Dylan Thomas Centre in the port area has a decent collection of memorabilia, photographs and books; the Kardomah on Park Street is not the original one where Thomas and his arty “gang” met, but it is a pleasingly retro eating place suited to talking about books and manifestos over a frothy coffee; and Salubrious Passage, which has the seamy character of LA’s Skid Row of yore, and will eventually pour you out on to Wind Street and the no sign Bar, which featured in Thomas’ story The Followers, renamed as Wine Vaults.

Then, after all this urban exploration, you should take that seafront prom and hike westward along the route followed by the world’s first passenger train (the 1805-built Mumbles Railway - a horse-drawn tramway), not stopping till you get to the end of the pier at dreamy, lovely, pretty Mumbles - where Twin Town also concludes, as it happens.

Every great city offers its walker/reader multiple narratives. In Greater Manchester (and yes, you may need trams and buses for this “walk”), I feel the musical ones have been told to death. Has anyone got anything more to say on Tony Wilson/Joy Division/“Madchester”, really? But LS Lowry remains beguiling because he is simultaneously mega-famous and massively ignored. He is too popular to be cool, too English to be stylish, too idiosyncratic to front a school or movement. He is also a vital visual conduit to the north’s industrial past and the industrialised souls of its inhabitants.