Matthew Wilcox

Matthew Wilcox is a freelance journalist, editor, and travel writer based in Wiltshire. A former author of the DK Eyewitness guides to Japan and Tokyo, he writes about art, wine, food, and wooden boats. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Economist, Apollo, and The Art Newspaper

The Norman Conquest wasn’t a disaster for England

For a certain kind of amateur historian there is a moment, fixed in the imagination, endlessly revisited: it is still not yet late on that bright October afternoon in 1066, the shield-wall locked and braced, the hill still theirs, the horses floundering on the slope below, Harold upright, the sun sinking but not yet gone,

Unesco status is killing Bath

Last month, the Trump administration announced that the United States would once again withdraw from Unesco, the Paris-based UN cultural agency responsible for World Heritage Sites, education initiatives, and cultural programmes worldwide. The official line? Unesco promotes ‘woke, divisive cultural and social causes’ and its ‘globalist, ideological agenda’ clashes with America First policy. Predictably, the

The Cotswolds is a Potemkin England

Have you heard the one where the vice president of the United States and a lesbian former talk show host walk into a farm shop in Gloucestershire? No, it’s not the set-up to a joke – it’s just another Tuesday in the Cotswolds in 2025. The Cotswolds still looks like England – hedgerows, pubs selling Sunday roasts