Stratford-upon-Avon

Choosing a base in Stratford-upon-Avon comes down to one question first: are you here for the theatre, or for the countryside around it? The answer changes everything else. If you have tickets at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre or the Swan, staying within the town centre is worth paying for. Performances often finish late, the walk back to a central hotel takes minutes, and the pre-theatre dining culture on Sheep Street and Waterside is built around exactly that pattern. If instead you are using Stratford as a gateway to the Cotswolds, Warwick and the Vale of Evesham, a country house or village inn five or six miles out will usually give you more room, more grounds and a lower rate for the same standard.

Within the town, the historic core around Chapel Street, Henley Street and Church Street holds the timber-framed and Georgian properties that people picture when they imagine staying here. Rooms in listed buildings are rarely uniform, so it pays to read the descriptions: a beamed room with a sloping floor is charming to some guests and awkward to others. Waterside and the Old Town are quieter than the shopping streets while still being a short walk from everything, and the Swan's Nest side across Clopton Bridge combines parking and gardens with a ten-minute riverside walk into the centre.

The best value in town is generally found on Alcester Road and Grove Road, the western approach near the railway station, where a run of family-run guest houses and small B&Bs offers proper cooked breakfasts, free parking and rates well below the hotels. This is the obvious choice if you are arriving by train from London or Birmingham and do not intend to drive at all.

Book early for anything falling in July, August, the Shakespeare birthday weekend in late April, or a popular RSC opening. Rates in the town centre can double at those points. Conversely, January and February are genuinely cheap, and midweek autumn stays often come in at half the summer price for the same room.

A first visit tends to divide between the Shakespeare properties, the theatre and the river. Two full days covers the essentials comfortably; three lets you reach the surrounding countryside.

• Shakespeare's Birthplace — The Henley Street house where he was born and grew up, restored and interpreted by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, with the glover's workshop his father used and a garden used for short performances in season.
• Royal Shakespeare Theatre — The RSC's main house on Waterside, rebuilt around a thrust stage in 2010; tickets are often available at short notice for weekday matinees, and the tower gives a wide view over the Avon meadows.
• Anne Hathaway's Cottage — The substantial thatched farmhouse in Shottery, a mile west of the centre, where Shakespeare's wife grew up; the gardens, orchard and woodland walk are as much of the visit as the house.
• Holy Trinity Church — The riverside parish church where Shakespeare was baptised and buried, with his grave and the funerary monument set in the chancel, and a fine avenue of limes running down to the door.
• Shakespeare's New Place — The site of the large house he bought in 1597 and died in, now a garden and exhibition rather than a reconstruction, next door to the Tudor Nash's House.
• Mary Arden's Farm — A working Tudor farm at Wilmcote, three miles out, where the buildings belonging to Shakespeare's mother's family are run with period livestock, falconry and open-hearth cooking.
• Stratford Butterfly Farm — A large tropical glasshouse on the Swan's Nest bank of the river, reliably useful with children and reliably warm on a bad day.
• The MAD Museum — Mechanical art and design on Henley Street, a collection of kinetic sculpture and automata that most adults enjoy more than they expect to.

Sheep Street is the town's densest run of restaurants, with Lambs and The Opposition both long-established in timbered premises and both geared to pre-theatre service. For serious cooking, Salt on Church Street holds a Michelin star and works from a short seasonal menu, while The Woodsman on Chapel Street builds its list around live-fire cooking, game and Warwickshire produce. The RSC's own Rooftop Restaurant is worth booking for the river view alone.

Pubs are plentiful and several are properly old. The Old Thatch Tavern on Greenhill Street is the town's oldest, thatched and low-beamed; the Dirty Duck on Waterside, formally the Black Swan, is the traditional post-performance haunt of RSC actors and has the signed photographs to prove it. Local ale comes from Purity Brewing at Great Alne and North Cotswold Brewery near Shipston, both widely stocked in town.

For provisions, the Friday street market on Rother Street is the general one, and a farmers' market runs there twice monthly with Warwickshire cheeses, cider and baking. Regional specialities worth seeking out include Vale of Evesham asparagus in May and June, Berkswell ewes' milk cheese, and the local truckle cheddars. Afternoon tea is close to an institution here: Hathaway Tea Rooms on Sheep Street is the most photographed, but there are plenty of quieter alternatives in the Old Town.

Camping around Stratford-upon-Avon is easy, gentle country camping rather than anything wild. The land is low-lying south Warwickshire farmland on the Avon and its tributaries, mostly under 100 metres, with clay and gravel soils and very little in the way of gradient. Pitches are typically level grass in old orchards, riverside meadows or paddocks behind hedgerows, and the walking from them runs through arable fields rather than up anything strenuous. That makes the area unusually good for families, first-time campers and anyone towing a caravan who does not fancy a Welsh hill road.

The town itself has no campsite inside the built-up area, but there are several genuine touring parks within two to six miles, and one of them sits on the racecourse a mile from the centre. That proximity is the real attraction of camping here: you can pitch up, walk or cycle into town along the Avon or the Greenway, see a play and walk back, which is a rare combination in England.

Weather is Midlands weather, which is to say drier than the west of the country and slower to warm than the south coast. Average summer highs sit in the low twenties Celsius, and rainfall is moderate and spread through the year. The catch is the river: the Avon floods readily after sustained rain, and low-lying riverside pitches can become soft or unusable in a wet spell. Most sites here are seasonal for that reason, typically opening in March and closing at the end of October.

Wild camping is not legal in England without the landowner's permission, and that includes every field and riverbank around Stratford. There is no equivalent of the Scottish right to roam, so the practical options are booked sites, certificated locations run by the camping clubs, or a farm that has explicitly agreed. The best months are May, June and September: May brings dry ground and long evenings without school-holiday prices, June has the longest days, and September gives quiet sites and the lowest rates of the season. August is workable but book months ahead, since the town's summer visitors spill straight into the campsites.