The big place

You go to London, you go to the museum. Tanks, planes, the lot. Everybody else is doing the same thing at the same time.

Then you walk back to the hotel the same way you came, because that's what everyone does.

The walk I didn't plan

One evening I went the long way round. Ordinary street, terraced houses, nothing special. And then a small blue plaque on the wall of a house.

There are loads of those on the streets around there. The one that stopped me, as near as I can remember, was this kind of thing: 100 Lambeth Road, where Captain William Bligh lived. The Bligh of the Mutiny on the Bounty. A story everyone knows, in a house nobody looks at, two minutes from one of the busiest museums in London.

Why it stuck

The museum tells you history. That front door was history. Somebody famous walked out of it every morning and down the same street I was standing on.

Nobody else was there. No queue, no ticket, nobody telling me where to stand.

It's like that beside every hotel

Wherever you stay, there's something small and real within a few minutes' walk: a plaque, a grave, a well, a wall older than the country.

Before you go out, open the map at the hotel and look at what's within half a mile. It takes a minute, and it's often the best thing you'll see all trip.