Chester

Chester is small enough that no choice of base is a bad one, but the difference between staying inside the walls and staying a mile out is real, and it comes down to whether you want to walk home from dinner or park the car for free.

Within the walls you are paying for footsteps saved. The city core is barely half a mile across, so a room on Lower Bridge Street or near the Eastgate puts the cathedral, the Rows, the amphitheatre and the river all within ten minutes on foot. These are mostly historic buildings converted to hotels, which means character, uneven floors and, in a few cases, no lift and no car park. If you are arriving by train and intend to eat and drink late, this is the right trade.

The Hoole side of the city, north-east of the centre around the station, is where most of the guest houses and bed and breakfasts sit. Victorian villas with off-street parking, breakfast cooked to order and a fifteen-minute level walk into town make this the sensible choice for a longer stay or a family trip. Rates are typically a third to a half below the city-centre equivalents, and Faulkner Street gives you a genuine neighbourhood of restaurants and shops rather than a tourist strip.

Across the Old Dee Bridge, Handbridge is quieter still, with riverside paths and fast access to the A55 for anyone heading on into North Wales. If you are here mainly for the zoo, Upton puts you a few minutes from the gates and saves an hour of traffic on a summer morning.

Finally, the countryside within fifteen minutes' drive holds several country-house hotels with spas, at Rowton, Pulford and beyond. These suit couples wanting gardens, a pool and free parking, and anyone visiting for a wedding or a spa break rather than sightseeing. The compromise is that you will need a taxi or a designated driver every evening you want to eat in the city.

Most of the city's set pieces sit within the walls, which means you can string several together in a morning without ever getting into a car.

• The City Walls – a two-mile circuit begun by the Romans and completed in the Middle Ages, walkable in about an hour, with steps down at each of the four gates so you can drop into the streets whenever you like.
• The Rows – continuous first-floor galleries above the ground-floor shops on the four main streets, a medieval arrangement found nowhere else, still lined with independent traders, cafes and bars.
• Chester Cathedral – a former Benedictine abbey with an unusually complete set of monastic buildings, including the cloisters, refectory and chapter house. The Cathedral at Height tour takes you along the roof spaces and up the tower for a view over the whole city.
• Chester Roman Amphitheatre – the largest so far uncovered in Britain, sitting just outside the walls near Newgate, with half the bowl excavated and the rest still under the ground and gardens beyond.
• Chester Zoo – two miles north at Upton, one of the most visited paid attractions in the United Kingdom, with large naturalistic habitats including the Islands and Heart of Africa zones. Allow a full day.
• Chester Racecourse – known as the Roodee, laid out inside a bend of the Dee on what was the Roman harbour, and the oldest racecourse still in use in Britain. The May Festival is the highlight of the calendar.
• The Groves and the River Dee – a riverside promenade with a bandstand, rowing boats and pleasure cruises, crossed by the Queen's Park suspension bridge and reached from the walls at the Bridgegate.
• Grosvenor Museum and Storyhouse – the former holds the Roman tombstone collection recovered from the walls; the latter is a converted 1930s cinema that now houses the city's theatre, library and cinema under one roof.

Cheshire cheese, one of the oldest named English cheeses, is the local speciality worth seeking out – crumbly, mild and much better fresh from a counter than shrink-wrapped. You will find it, along with a strong run of street-food stalls and producers, at Chester Market, which moved into the Northgate development on Exchange Square in 2022 and now works as much as an evening eating hall as a daytime shop.

For a proper dinner, Joseph Benjamin on Northgate Street has been the reliable independent bistro for years, Covino does small plates and low-intervention wine on Christleton Road, and Hypha on Bridge Street has drawn national attention for its fermentation-led plant cooking. Out in Hoole, Sticky Walnut was the restaurant that started Gary Usher's group and still fills every night. The Arkle at the Chester Grosvenor is the choice for a long, formal meal.

The pubs are half the pleasure. The Brewery Tap on Gate Street occupies a seventeenth-century hall and pours beer from Spitting Feathers; Telford's Warehouse sits canalside at Tower Wharf with live music most weekends; the Albion on Park Street is an unreconstructed Victorian corner pub with a First World War theme and no music at all; and the Bear and Billet on Lower Bridge Street is a striking timber-framed building that has been serving drinkers for well over three centuries.

Chester itself is a tight walled city with no campsite inside it, but the Cheshire Plain that surrounds it is dotted with touring parks, and several sit within a few miles of the centre. The terrain is the defining feature: this is low, flat, well-drained farmland broken by the sandstone ridge that carries the Sandstone Trail south from Frodsham. Pitching is easy, levelling is rarely a problem, and none of the approaches involve the kind of single-track lanes that make Wales or the Lakes stressful in a large outfit.

The soil is the catch. Much of the plain is heavy clay, which means grass pitches can stay soft well into May and turn quickly after a wet spell in late summer. If you are touring outside the peak months, or if your outfit is heavy, book a hardstanding. Several sites near Chester are hardstanding-only for exactly this reason, and the Caravan and Motorhome Club site north of the city is almost entirely gravel.

Weather is kinder here than the reputation of the north-west suggests. Chester sits in the rain shadow of the Welsh hills and records noticeably less rainfall than Snowdonia an hour to the west. Summers are mild rather than hot, and the sheltered inland position means far less wind than the Wirral coast. Midges are not the problem they are in Scotland, though canal-side pitches attract mosquitoes on still July evenings.

On the legal side, wild camping is not permitted in England without the landowner's express consent, and there is no equivalent of the Scottish access rights. Cheshire is intensively farmed and almost entirely private, so plan on a booked pitch. The practical season runs from Easter to the end of October, with most independent parks licensed from mid-March to late October and only the club sites open year round. May, June and September are the best combination of firm ground, long days and space to pitch, while August books out around the zoo and the racecourse calendar.