Bristol

Brunel designed it, but the bridge was finished only in 1864, 5 years after his death, and it hangs high over the Avon Gorge. Cars pay a toll; crossing on foot is free. A visitor centre by the bridge tells how it was built.

Brunel's iron steamship, launched in 1843, sits back in the dry dock where it was built. A glass plate around the ship, holding a thin layer of water, plays the sea, and you go beneath it to look up at the hull and propeller. Down there the air is kept dry.

Well Hung Lover, on a building's side wall in Frogmore Street, was kept after a public vote instead of being painted over. In Stokes Croft, Mild Mild West shows a teddy bear throwing a petrol bomb at riot police. Both are out on the street to walk up to.

A free city museum in a converted dockside shed. The statue of slave trader Colston, thrown into the harbour by protesters in 2020 and fished out, was once shown here lying down. On set weekends the quayside electric cranes and steam train run.

A parish church, not a cathedral, yet its spire and nave match many a cathedral in size. Elizabeth I is said to have called it the fairest parish church in England. Gilded carved bosses sit wherever the stone ribs of the vault meet.

Atop a former windmill, a camera obscura casts the outside view onto a round table in a dark room. A passage through the rock drops to a small ledge on the gorge cliff, the suspension bridge straight ahead. The passage is narrow, the steps steep.

A free city museum with an old Bristol-built biplane hanging over the central hall. In 2009 Banksy slipped his own works into a show here and over 300,000 people came. The angel with a paint pot on its head, left from that show, is still in the hall.

Built atop Brandon Hill in the 1890s to mark 400 years since John Cabot sailed from Bristol to North America. The climb is free, and the spiral stair is so narrow you squeeze past anyone coming down. From the top the harbour and Clifton lie in one view.

An indoor market in and around the 18th-century Exchange, with food stalls packed under the glass-roofed arcade. On Corn Street in front stand four bronze pillars, the nails, where merchants settled deals. Pay on the nail supposedly began there.

A limestone gorge cut deep into the Mendip Hills southwest of the city, counted as the deepest in England. In 1903 Gough's Cave gave up Cheddar Man, Britain's oldest complete human skeleton. The cliff-top path above the gorge has stretches with no fence.

Founded as an abbey in 1140, the cathedral faces College Green and charges nothing to enter. Its choir aisles rise as high as the main vault, a hall-church plan rare in England. Round by the cloister hides a Norman chapter house.

A narrow stone stairway climbing straight up from Lewins Mead, set as steps in 1669. Small galleries, tearooms and an old pub line both sides. The steps are steep, so on wet days people come down holding the rail.

A curving terrace started on the Clifton slope as the 1700s drew to a close, billed as the longest raised terrace in Europe. Its stone walkway gazes down on harbour cranes and rooftops. The houses are lived in, so the interiors stay private.

An aviation museum opened in 2017 in old hangars on Filton airfield. Concorde was assembled here, and Alpha Foxtrot, the last one built and the last to fly, has a hangar to itself. Visitors can step into its narrow cabin.

A big estate over the Avon Gorge on Bristol's western fringe, with a deer park and woodland paths, free to roam. Each August the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta sends dozens of balloons up from it at dawn. Its slopes overlook Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Nine cottages designed in 1811 by architect John Nash for retired estate workers. Each has its own chimneys and roofline, set around a round green. They are still private homes, so only the green is open; pair it with the nearby Blaise Castle woods.

A slender iron pier of 1869 reaching into the Severn estuary; poet John Betjeman rated it the finest pier in England. Its legs are cut from railway track under a plank deck. The estuary's tides are huge, and at low water mud flats spread beneath it.

The cathedral of Wells, England's smallest city, which buses from Bristol reach in about an hour. X-shaped scissor arches went in at the crossing in the 14th century to carry the tower. A medieval north transept clock sets knights jousting every 15 minutes.