If you’re planning a staycation in the UK, you’ve probably been recommended the same few places loads of times. For a city break try London, if you fancy a beach head to Cornwall, and if you want a bit of both with some history mixed in, Edinburgh awaits. Sometimes, however, you want something a bit different. For that, you have to look beyond the guidebooks and travel offices and trust the opinions of random strangers on the internet.
There’s no better place to find people with in-depth, weirdly specific knowledge than on Reddit. If you’re not familiar with how it works, it’s basically a container of lots of smaller forums and discussion boards, full of people asking questions and getting responses from other members of their community. Recently, one user asked the good people of r/uktravel what the most ‘surprisingly good’ destinations in the country are, and the responses did not disappoint.
The original poster got the conversation going with their suggestion: Hull. They praised its ‘beautiful old town’, its ‘great museums’, and mentioned the fact that it’s in a prime position for day trips to Leeds, Beverley, Scarborough, and Bridlington. Overall, the poster declared the Yorkshire town a ‘great city with an undeserved reputation’.
The top response, aka the comment with the most ‘upvotes’, was Halifax. Although you might think that this town’s most notable feature is its proximity to bigger cities like Leeds and Manchester, this user said that Piece Hall, the area’s biggest tourist attraction, is well worth a visit. Someone else also pointed out that the area, very near Hebden Bridge, has longstanding historical significance to the queer community.
Liverpool also popped up in a few comments, with one user even saying ‘anyone who has not yet been to Liverpool should absolutely go there’, and another praising the city’s ‘high quality museums and lively atmosphere’. Liverpool was also one of our top places to visit in the UK this year.
You might be noticing a pattern here. The people of Reddit overwhelmingly recommended towns or cities in the north, with Newcastle – which the poster described as ‘much nicer than Oxford – and Helmsley, Yorkshire being the next top recommended destinations. The first mention of anything southern is the Barbican in London, which appears quite far down the thread.
Is Reddit full of northerners, or are the most underrated breaks in the UK actually all beyond Birmingham? The only way to find out is to see it for yourself.
You can see the full thread on Reddit here if you want to verify with your own eyes that the north really is the place to be.
Planning your 2025 staycations
If you’re currently on the hunt for a perfect 2025 getaway and none of the above tickle your fancy, here’s our favourite family friendly holiday digs. But you deserve to have fun too – here’s some tree houses you can rent out for something a little different. We’ve also got guides to the country’s cosiest cabins, and the coolest castles you can stay overnight in.
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Now on the market: an island in Scotland with its own castle
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