Unconventional site- seeing

I know of a man who took his new bride as a honeymoon treat on a tour of the sites where the Yorkshire Ripper had murdered his victims. A curious choice, but she declared herself well pleased with the visit and in particular with the delicious salami sandwiches her husband provided. I remembered this odd tale when browsing through Clive Aslet’s Landmarks of Britain. Among his ‘Five Hundred Places that Made Our History’ is Bridego Bridge near Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, scene of the Great Train Robbery. All I remember of that night in 1963 was that the train driver was brutally beaten about the head and was so badly injured that he never worked again. Aslet adds that after the robbery the thieves, Ronnie Biggs and Bruce Reynolds among them, took their £2.3 million-worth of banknotes to a remote farmhouse and passed the time using them to play Monopoly. Finger- prints on the Monopoly board were part of the evidence at the trial.

You may wonder why Aslet recommends a visit to Bridego Bridge in the same breath, so to speak, as visits to the site of Culloden, or William the Conqueror’s landing in Britain, or the place of Charles I’s execution. The answer is that this is no conventional gazetteer, nor is it a guide book. It is a charming, erudite, amusing and very personal list of places of which Aslet says that were you to visit all 500 ‘you would find the whole panorama of British history laid open before you’. Spaghetti Junction, the Slough Trading Estate and Trellick Tower are all included. Of Spaghetti Junction, reviled by motorists, he says that seen from the air ‘the ribbons of curving carriageway seem to interlace with the pleasing intimacy of an Elizabethan knot garden’ and from below offer a ‘three-dimensional wonder’.