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I am the archetypal Anglophile and remain, like Ruskin, ever faithful to ‘blind, tormented, unwearied, marvellous England’. For me it is the most beautiful country in the world. It is also the most geologically complicated and in consequence provides an inimitable palette of constantly shifting colours: the shades of buff or red brick, or the depth of gold in the limestone, vary from one village to the next. The cob and thatch country of deep-valleyed Devon is a world apart from the wide-skied marshes of pebbled and pantiled Norfolk, as are the lush Cornish ‘hedges’, thick with bluebells, stitchwort and campion, from the bleak curlew-haunted heights of the Yorkshire moors. The wildly differing local building styles serve as a wonderful gallery of England’s unsung craftsmen. My book includes places in every county, for it would be impossible to do England justice without displaying the fierce local pride of each.

Apart from a handful of showstoppers such as Ely Cathedral in the Fens and Cragside in Northumberland, I do not dwell on perfectly preserved places but more on ordinary England, often battered around the edges and interwoven with modern development. I think we have become impossibly snobbish in seeking out some sort of conservation ideal. From time immemorial, cities, towns and villages have evolved, and new houses have been built among the old and around the edges. Council houses once derided by aesthetes are now an established part of our towns and villages. Some Sixties housing estates have settled over time, grown trees and developed idiosyncrasies. It is the spirit of a particular place which moves me, not so much the fine quality of its architecture. Stanhope, for instance, is not a pretty town, it is a strong-feeling one.

Richard Ingrams created this column for me seventeen years ago. He was actually paying me to indulge in my favourite pastime – exploring England. Inextricably woven through my childhood, the thrill of the journey and the possibility of finding some unknown wonder or half-remembered place is always with me. My mother’s love of the landscape, as well as of pre-history – barrows, earthworks, stone circles and cromlechs – became part of me. My earliest memories are of riding along the Berkshire Ridgeway, sometimes for a few days at a time, and diverting to places like Ashdown, stranded in the downs, and White Horse Hill, ever top of the list.  
Early car journeys with my parents were drawn-out affairs and my father John Betjeman’s love of place and of what he described as ‘indeterminate beauty’ meant that we stopped in nearly every town or village along the way to look at churches, houses and peculiar things. The ivy-clad entrance to the Sapperton Canal tunnel remains a top place for me and it would be hard to forget being led by the hand into the cool, calm beauty of the tiny church of Winterborne Tomson in Dorset. This quest for the romance of England has never faded and, too lazy to walk, I have found half the places in this book by horse, approaching them from unadopted tracks which have often brought me to unfamiliar views.

Tourists may find perfection in Castle Combe and Chipping Campden, but I prefer places which are off the beaten track. Even within earshot of a motorway’s constant moan or a mere stone’s throw from a gigantic conurbation such as Aylesbury or Middlesborough, as long as one is going at a leisurely pace, there are still beautiful bits of ‘unwearied, marvellous England’ to be found. Though the pastoral idyll conjured up by Brian Cook posters and Helen Allingham water colours never really existed, I am more than happy with what is here and never stop being surprised at how wonderful England is. I hope this book shows that.