A Traveller's Year

Travis Elborough is an author and social commentator. His books include the four titles in the Unexpected Atlases series - Atlas of Improbable Places, Atlas of the Unexpected, Atlas of Vanishing Places and Atlas of Forgotten Places, together with A Traveller’s Year, A London Year, The Long-Player Goodbye, Being A Writer and A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution. Travis is a regular contributor to Radio 4 and the Guardian, and has penned articles on all aspects of travel and culture, from pirates in the Caribbean to donkeys at the British seaside. He has written for the Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, BBC History Magazine and Kinfolk among others. NICK RENNISON has worked as a writer, editor and bookseller for more than twenty years. His London Blue Plaque Guide has been through three editions in the last decade and he has also published The Book of London Lists, described by the London Evening Standard as a book that 'can teach even the most die-hard Londoner something they didn't know'. He lives in Stockport. 

Themes include:

Journeys westward in America - diaries of people who travelled as emigrants to the West

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century travellers' encounters with the remains of earlier cultures eg.

Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, pre-Columbian Americas

What you might call 'anthropological' traveling eg. Darwin on Tierra del Fuegians and a nineteenth

century Italian who was one of the first to travel into New Guinea

Travellers in first phase of imperial expansion eg. 17th century diaries of East India Company

merchants travelling to India and Japan

Travellers discovering part of their own country is as foreign to them as abroad eg Orwell going north

Entries which reflect classic eras of travel writing eg. the Thirties with Waugh, Robert Byron, Graham

Greene etc or Eighties with Bruce Chatwin

Religious sightseeing - nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans travelling to Holy Land

Travellers who hate travelling and fill their diaries with complaints about how bloody awful abroad is

and how dreadful the ways of foreigners are

People travelling to Britain from elsewhere and finding it a foreign country

Heroic deaths in the sun and on the ice

Scientific investigation

Aristocratic and artistic self-improvement (especially to Paris, Venice, and Rome)

18th century women travellers and wives of East India Company staff

Luxury leisure, package tours and backpacking.