Shrewsbury

Shrewsbury's compact centre, wrapped almost entirely by the River Severn, makes location a genuinely useful thing to think about before booking. Stay inside the loop, on streets like Wyle Cop, Dogpole or around the Square, and you can walk to the castle, museum, Abbey and every restaurant without touching a car again until you leave; several of the town's oldest coaching inns occupy exactly this ground, their beams and sloping floors part of the appeal. Move a little further out and you trade a few minutes' walk for country-house grounds, spas and easier parking, particularly at the handful of manor and hall hotels that ring the town on the roads towards Ellesmere, Battlefield and the Welsh border.

Budget matters too. Shrewsbury has a genuine spread from simple, well-run guest houses in Georgian townhouses on the fringes of the centre through to four-star country hotels with restaurants of their own. Business travellers and those attending events at the nearby showground or Shrewsbury Sixth Form tend to favour the edge-of-town hotels close to the A5 and A49, where parking is straightforward and the motorway network is minutes away. Couples and short-break visitors, meanwhile, usually get more from a night or two inside the loop, where the medieval streets are lit at dusk and everything of interest is within a ten-minute stroll. Whichever you choose, book ahead for the Flower Show weekend in August and during the main summer school holidays, when the town's limited stock of central rooms fills quickly.

Shrewsbury rewards slow exploration on foot, but it also has enough set-piece attractions to fill several days.

• Shrewsbury Castle is a red sandstone fortress founded by the Normans, remodelled by Thomas Telford, and now home to the Soldiers of Shropshire Museum, with grounds that give some of the best views over the Severn loop.
• Darwin's birthplace and statue mark the naturalist's childhood home on the site of The Mount, with a bronze statue of a seated Darwin outside the library building that now occupies part of Shrewsbury School's old site.
• Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, housed in the restored Music Hall, holds more than 300,000 items including Roman finds from nearby Wroxeter and the celebrated Shropshire Mammoth skeleton.
• The Quarry and Dingle Gardens form an eighteenth-century riverside park whose sunken flower garden, designed by Percy Thrower, blooms in a mass of colour every summer and hosts the Shrewsbury Flower Show.
• Shrewsbury Abbey, a Benedictine foundation dating to 1083, survives as a working parish church across the English Bridge and provided the setting for the Cadfael murder mystery novels.
• Wroxeter Roman City, a short drive south-east, preserves the excavated remains of Viroconium, once the fourth-largest city in Roman Britain, alongside a reconstructed Roman villa.
• The Old Market Hall, a Grade I-listed sixteenth-century building in the Square, now works as an independent cinema and café beneath its original open arcaded ground floor.
• A guided walk through the medieval shuts and passages, the town's network of narrow alleyways linking the main streets, is the best way to appreciate the sheer density of timber-framed architecture packed into the loop.

Shrewsbury's food scene runs on a mix of long-standing institutions and a growing crop of independent openings. The town gives its name to the Shrewsbury biscuit, a spiced shortbread traditionally sold in local bakeries, and Shropshire's dairy country means good cheese and cider are never far from a menu. The twice-weekly market in the Square and the adjoining Market Hall food stalls are the best places to pick up local produce, from Shropshire Blue cheese to game and cider brandy. The riverside pubs along Wyle Cop and around the Abbey, several dating back centuries, serve solid pub food alongside a strong selection of Shropshire real ales from breweries such as Salopian and Hobsons. In the evening, independent restaurants around the Square and Milk Street offer everything from modern British cooking to Nepalese and Italian menus, while the covered arcades hide small coffee roasters and delicatessens well worth seeking out on a slower morning.

Shropshire's gently rolling farmland and the dramatic scarp of the Long Mynd give camping around Shrewsbury a distinctly varied character within a short drive of the town. Close to Shrewsbury itself the land is soft and pastoral, given over to touring parks with level pitches, hedged boundaries and easy road access, well suited to caravans and motorhomes as well as tents. Head south towards Church Stretton and the terrain changes quickly, climbing into heather-covered hills where campsites sit closer to the ground and the nights are noticeably cooler, popular with walkers heading up onto the Long Mynd and Shropshire Way.

Wild camping has no general legal right in England, Shropshire included, and the open hill country around the Long Mynd is mostly common land or National Trust ground where camping without permission is not allowed; the honest approach is to use one of the region's licensed touring parks and farm sites, several of which sit within easy reach of genuinely wild-feeling countryside without the legal grey area. Weather-wise, Shropshire's inland position means less rain than the Welsh hills just over the border but still a changeable British climate, so May, June and September tend to offer the most reliable combination of dry ground and mild nights. July and August are busiest and warmest, ideal for families, while sites near Shrewsbury itself stay open and pleasant well into October for those happy with cooler evenings and quieter pitches.