Send visitors to Burton? What a capital idea

Visit Britain: the name means what it says on the tin. Its role is to attract people to this country and encourage them to soak in the history and the culture of our islands.

It has a problem. As it admitted a few weeks ago, too many visitors from overseas equate visiting Britain with visiting London. Most of them don’t venture away from the capital and miss out on such glories as the Lake District, the Northumbrian coast, the Yorkshire Dales, and Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands.

And what about Britain’s pubs and breweries? It’s an established fact — almost a cliché — that high on many visitors’ wish lists is a trip to a pub. The Visit Britain website lists its “Top 10” pubs – including such gems as the Old Cheshire Cheese in London, the Philharmonic in Liverpool, the Trip to Jerusalem in Nottingham and the Cafe Royal in Edinburgh.

For further information, people are told, they should go the Good Pub Guide website.

Distinctively British​

Frankly, that’s a cop out. People unused to the structure and counties of Britain aren’t going to wade through lists of pubs in a guide directed mainly at people living here. It would be more sensible to direct visitors to the Campaign for Real Ale’s Heritage Pubs list, now available in a superb book.

And there’s more than one great pub in London, for goodness sake. Why doesn’t Visit Britain organise tours of London pubs and other major towns and cities?

The same goes for breweries. As well as visiting pubs, people from overseas are intrigued by our beer. It’s different to the beers available in most other countries. Lager is available, but we do produce large amounts of something distinctively British: ale served by handpumps in thousands of pubs.

Ale is produced by a large number of the country’s breweries. There are more than 1,000 of them in Britain today, the biggest number since the 1930s. And many of those breweries welcome visitors.

The Visit Britain website lists a few of them but, as with pubs, leaves it up to visitors to make their own arrangements.

The list is hit-and-miss. Why mention Black Sheep in Masham, Yorkshire, but not its near neighbour, Theakston, producer of the legendary Old Peculier? Chiltern in Buckinghamshire and St Peter’s in Suffolk are both fascinating breweries but not easy to find while Black Isle and Arran in Scotland might be on the moon as far as most visitors are concerned.

Rewarding​

The approach of Visit Britain — previously the British Tourist Authority and answerable to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport — works in sharp contrast to its opposite number in Belgium, Visit Flanders.

Last month I spent a hectic but rewarding four days in the Dutch-speaking part of the country where I visited half a dozen breweries and ate in some superb restaurants where chefs match beer with food.
The people who run Visit Flanders are proud of their beers and breweries. They organise regular trips for writers and journalists. I had to drop out of a group tour earlier this year but Visit Flanders was willing to take me solo last month. As a result I was able to visit Frank Boon’s brewery — one of the most famous of the lambic producers, where beer is made with wild yeasts in the atmosphere — and a new brewery in the town of Hoegaarden, famous for its white, spiced wheat beer.

Since I returned, I have written several pieces for my website, which I hope will generate more interest in the beers of Belgium.

Long history​

Back home, Visit Britain doesn’t organise trips to breweries. Among breweries it recommends on its website​ is Marston’s in Burton-on-Trent. It’s a brewery of enormous interest, with the famous “Burton Unions” where beer is fermented in giant oak casks and is definitely worth a visit.

But Burton also has a major tourist attraction, the National Brewery Centre​, part of the Molson Coors site, which is not mentioned by Visit Britain. The NBC traces the long history of brewing in the town with a series of tableaux. There are old brewing vessels, interactive displays, stables with dray horses, and an in-house micro-brewery named after William Worthington, one of the great titans of Burton brewing in the 19th century.

The beers from the brewery can be tasted in a bar and restaurant that are part of the complex and there is a shop.

Burton-on-Trent, historic home of such great beer styles as Burton Ale and India Pale Ale, is one of the most important brewing towns in the world. There are tours organised by local people but it needs and deserves greater support from Visit Britain.

A spokesperson told me that while Visit Britain does organise press trips they don’t include breweries and she hadn’t heard of the National Brewery Centre in Burton.

Time for a re-think. At the moment, where pubs and breweries are concerned, Visit Britain is selling Britain short.