‘Most people who have been to Crewe station have never been to Crewe.’ In a moment of serendipity, my train pulls into Crewe station at the exact moment I turn the page to begin the chapter ‘Changing Tracks’ in Chris Moss’s new travelogue Where Tourists Seldom Tread.

In his Guardian column ‘Postcards from Britain’, Moss visits and reconsiders ‘improbable, bypassed and unloved’ destinations, such as Warrington, Gateshead, Paisley, Clacton-on-Sea – and Crewe, which my train from London has reached after no small delay. Moss is right, of course: I have travelled through Crewe more times than I have eaten disappointing Upper Crust baguettes, but I have never actually been into the town.

It is here that Moss discovers a wealth of railway history, as well as the market hall, which once warehoused 200,000 tons of Cheshire cheese – and a lot of evidence of demolition. It becomes a template for his travels, in which he finds music, poetry, literature, art, architecture, and, very often, dilapidation. These apparently unremarkable towns contain multitudes, if only we can be bothered to look.

Moss’s quiet curiosity is infectious. Over and over again I paused when reading to look up things he describes – the Warrington Academy, or a string of Lowry paintings, or Birkenhead’s Woodside ventilation tower – ‘a sublime expression of form meeting function… structural engineering as shadow-lith’. His precise architectural sketches do justice and bring personality to myriad seemingly unprepossessing places.

There is a real possibility when exploring such towns – some no longer destinations in their own right and most of them underfunded and forgotten – that the narrative could become jaded, cynical, belittling or contemptuous. Moss avoids this admirably, finding virtue in the exploration itself. Jaywick, bordering Clacton-on-Sea, was identified as England’s most deprived neighbourhood in the government’s Indices of Deprivation for 2010, 2015, 2019 and 2025. ‘That in itself is no reason to stay away,’ Moss tells us.

Indeed, his approach to beauty – or its lack – is tender and thoughtful: ‘Ugliness has as many forms as beauty, and it, too, is in the eye of the beholder.’ He writes well about the unbeautiful without ever becoming Pollyanaish:

It’s not so much a mist as a whitish murk, a weakness of light due to the late season and lowering sky. Mirroring the grasping raised hands of wintry trees are bare branches plunged into still water, in turn reflected there. I think of flooded forests on the upper Amazon. But I’m in Warrington.

How could you not wish to read on and discover more about what Moss finds there?

‘Ugliness has as many forms as beauty, and it, too, is in the eye of the beholder’

‘My hope is that readers will want to visit the places I have included,’ he says early on. This wasn’t quite how the book left me feeling. Instead, I experienced a more holistic reframing. I do not, for example, need to go to Felling, an industrial suburb of Gateshead six miles from where I grew up, because I passed through it twice daily for more than a decade. But I still had no idea that it was named after the open area created when woodlands were cut down to build ships some 850 years ago (although other sources dispute this). It’s less that I didn’t know this, more that it had never occurred to me to question it. The fact that Ipswich is twice as old as Machu Picchu doesn’t fill me with a yearning to go there; but it makes me wonder why I value aspects of geography, history and architecture in certain settings but don’t consider them in others. As Moss puts it: ‘History flows through everything.’

In St Helens, a town which neighbours where Moss grew up, the slamming together of the past, present and future is almost unbearably poignant:

You have to write quickly when it comes to British towns. Their buildings drop faster than you can type. Today is 6 May 2025; in 11 days the bus station will be closed to be razed. The buses were: the 329 to Southport and home; the 10 to Liverpool and the university; the 141 to Earlestown via Burtonwood.

Inevitably, Where Tourists Seldom Tread will form a snapshot – a postcard, if you will – of Britain during the few years Moss has been visiting these places. But his book will stand as a document, a witness statement, that we will no doubt return to, as some things change and some stay exactly the same.