Travel Writers Online

SuDS, Stonehouse and Plymouth Stonehouse was a separate place, a neighbour to Plymouth, until the towns were merged in 1914. Since the turn of the millennium, former Ministry of Defence property in Stonehouse has passed into local city council and then private hands for regeneration of the dockside area, including our area of study, known as Millbay. The first notable leisure and housing project was to convert the Royal William Victualling Yard. Our mission is to find walking routes into and around this emerging tourist area as it changes use to leisure and becomes part of the experience economy. As the writing and photography took shape under the title of The Millbay Residency, a marshland regeneration scheme funded by the European Union's Interreg initiative also reached completion on Bath Street, Plymouth. The local government and the urban regeneration scheme gave this old urban marshland a new French-styled place-brand with the name Millbay Boulevard. How is that connecting wi

In 1952, between 23rd and 28th August, Michèle Bernstein spent time in the French port of Le Havre, Normandy seeking out the places that had inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea , or so we learn from some fragments left by Patrick Straram, collected together as Les bouteilles se couchent .  The Sartre novel which inspired Michèle Bernstein was from 1938; it was Sartre's first published novel. Sartre set the story in the port city on the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy where he had been a schoolteacher.  Nausea is written as diary entries, with street-names that should be easy to find for any literary dériviste ; in the quotation from Nausea below, the narrator, Antoine Roquentin has just come out of the library. A bronze statue of Gustave Impetraz stands nearby: Thursday, 11.30 I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville [Le Havre] are proud of it becau

Heading for Brittany We should go to France in this post. You've been waiting for some travel writing for long enough, n'est-ce pas ? Is that not so?  In this trip we are heading for Brittany, by sailing from Plymouth to Roscoff on Brittant Ferries.  Brittany - the Reading & Writing Region.  The tourist development organisation of this huge Région, to use the French spelling, used to promote Bretagne as the place for reading and writing.  Many organisations took this to heart and began publishing projects, specialist libraries and even the écrithèque in Quimper.  L'écrithèque is a made-up word, think of the French for writing, écriture, and add the ending from discothèque.  Brittany has its own ferry service from Plymouth and Portsmouth, Brittany Ferries, which is only a continuation of the migration of Britons to Brittany that began when Brythonic Celts from Devon and Cornwall began to sail over as Roman, and then Anglo-Saxon occupation, spread across the Westcountry o