From a boozer to the Norfolk Broads: a riverside walk to The Ship, Reedham

As summer holidays come to an end, 50 Best has compiled its list of the World’s 50 Best Hotels in 2023.

Drawing visitors since the 1700s, North Norfolk has long been a place of escapism. You arrive ready to fill your lungs with sea air and let your gaze drift to the horizon. The natural beauty here is not the kind that smacks you in the face and overwhelms with superlatives. The expansive beaches, endless skies, fenland and watery network of the Broads are a more subtle tonic for the soul — you don’t have to work too hard to forget life beyond this somewhat overlooked patch of East Anglia.

From St Ives station, there’s a view of sand, palms and, across misty blue water, a lighthouse on a rocky island. Virginia Woolf and her sister, artist Vanessa Bell, saw this view as children from the house their father rented. It later featured in Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, set in the Hebrides but clearly inspired by St Ives. She describes “the great plateful of blue water” and “hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere in the midst”. Images have lingered ever since I read it years ago at college, and my pub walk is something of a literary pilgrimage.

For generations, designers have adopted towns, villages, and other enclaves as second homes and visited them again and again, imprinting a touch of their own sensibility on their chosen place—and importing something of its essence into their own work. It’s the kind of symbiosis that Coco Chanel and Le Corbusier, who summered in neighboring homes, enjoyed with the Cote d’Azur’s Rouquebrune Cap-Martine, or Yves Saint Laurent with Marrakech and Tangier. More recently, Christian Louboutin popularized the Portuguese village of Melides, eventually opening Vermelho Hotel there earlier this year. Here, five designers on the places they go, and why they continue to be pulled back.

Ultra-cheap flights could be banned in Europe if a forthcoming proposal is approved by the EU: Officials in France want to set a price minimum on airfares across Europe to help reduce carbon emissions.

Overlooking the English Channel is a small resort town bedecked with freestone facades and half-timbered houses. English is heard everywhere, from the Art Deco Westminster hotel to the lighthouse, which, on the occasion of the late Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee, was lit up with Her Majesty's favourite colours. The bells of city hall chime in an echo of Big Ben, and it was just announced that the town's airport will soon be rechristened after Queen Elizabeth II.

The first written evidence of beer being brewed and consumed dates back as far as 4,000BC, with the ancient Sumerians believed to have developed the earliest known methods for creating the alcoholic drink. Its history and connection to human civilisation runs deep, and a number of today’s beers have their own remarkable heritage.

There’s something wonderfully liberating about travelling alone and the following trips fulfil all the best aspects of being solo. No compromises to be made, no itineraries discussed; get up when you want, eat what you fancy, do nothing or everything, talk to the friendly person next to you at breakfast, or pop in your headphones and ignore them completely. When I’m travelling alone, I become the best version of myself; the most decisive, the most charming, the most curious. I see more, go further, strike up conversations with people I’ll never meet again, yet always remember. And even after 25 years of travelling, I still get the same feeling of satisfaction when I’m home – a quiet sense of pleasure that I did it all on my own.

Despite its famously sepia-toned skies, England remains a perennially popular destination.

For the first time, a nation is allowing travelers to cross its border with a digital passport on their smartphone instead of a physical passport. While the trial is happening in Finland, the European Union wants at least 80% of citizens in the 27-country bloc to be using a digital ID by 2030.

France’s transport minister announced this week that the nation plans to raise taxes on flights and reallocate funds to its railways. The news comes following a ban on short-haul domestic flights with train alternatives of 2.5 hours or less that came into effect in May. Both measures aim to reignite public interest in train travel in an effort to combat climate change.

Sometime around 1933, two teenage cousins, Harry Hall and Will Cubbon, paid a visit to a new friend of theirs named Gef. Gef lived in a remote, windswept farmhouse on the Isle of Man. He was very shy, and the cousins could hear and talk to him, but never saw their new friend. From behind a wall, Gef would guess heads-or-tails when a coin was flipped or play catch with a rubber ball through a hole in the attic ceiling.