Shrewsbury, Chester and Beyond
Local Info
Attingham Park
At the confluence of the River Tern and the River Severn, this Regency mansion and its 4,000 acres of parkland are managed by the National Trust and offer beautiful walking, a walled garden, deer park, children’s play area, and café.
Ironbridge Gorge Museums & Blists Hill
Ironbridge, the world’s first ever cast-iron bridge, is now at the heart of a string of visitor attractions – museums, relics of the Industrial Revolution, and Victorian curiosities. You can visit museums, a former pipe factory, an abandoned tunnel that oozes tar, and Blists Hill, the open-air museum that recreates the steam era, including live ‘Victorian’ townsfolk, shillings, and an old-fashioned fair ground.
Hoo Farm
Big cats, badgers, sheep racing, meercats and more, the family-run Hoo Farm – also known as Hoo Zoo, and now featuring a dinosaur park – provides good entertainment for children and is open seven days a week.
The Crocky Trail
This mile-long outdoor adventure trail for children features slides, wobbly bridges and swings over the stream. You can bring your own picnic to eat in a tree-house, or get your provisions from their café.
Chester Zoo
The nearby Roman city of Chester is home to one of the world’s leading zoos – the most visited wildlife attraction in Britain – operated by the North of England Zoological Society. Great for adults as well as children, it is huge, incredibly diverse, and deeply committed to worldwide conservation efforts and preventing extinction.
Tate Liverpool
Housed in a converted warehouse on the Albert Dock waterfront in Liverpool, Tate Liverpool is an art gallery and museum with a fabulously-decorated café. It displays the national collection of British art (1500 to the present day) as well as temporary exhibitions. Admission to the main collection is free (although you may still need
to book in advance); exhibition prices vary.
‘Another Place’ by Anthony Gormley
On the sticky sand of Crosby Beach on the Mersey Estuary, a hundred cast iron statues made from moulds of the artist’s body stand looking out to sea. Designed to explore the relationship between the natural elements, space and the human body, this unforgettable outdoor exhibit stretches for nearly three kilometres along the shoreline, and one kilometre across the ebbing and flowing tide out to sea.