The Challenge

Rules of the Challenge

1. Visit every city, town, village and hamlet on mainland Great Britain.

Any coastal islands will be included but are not necessary to complete the challenge.
Also, there will be special posts for interesting places that require it, such as castles.

2. A stop must be made in each place.

No fly-bys; i.e. no driving through a place and logging it as successfully completed. Ideally, we should be in a location for more than ten minutes. Even the most boring places have something to see.

3. A video document should be taken.

This is a good way of proving to others and reminding ourselves that we have been to a particular place. Sometimes a good documentary can be made about an interesting location. Sometimes not. But a short video is more entertaining than a photograph.

Some of our old videos will be used to satisfy the challenge. We have been to many places over the years and have had a digital video camera since 2004. Before that we had the use of an SVHS camera left over from a business that we ran in the 1990s.

And that's it!


Why are we undertaking this challenge and what is the timescale?

The British Challenge was devised by us in 2008 whilst sat at home, looking at a map and deciding where to go for our next holiday with our family. We thought about visiting our usual favourite seaside town of Tenby in Pembrokeshire, Wales, a journey of about 5 hours from our home in Stafford, Staffordshire, England. Then we started thinking about all the places that we would normally drive through and past to get to Tenby. What were we missing by sticking to the bigger A-Roads? What historic places of interest? Places of natural beauty? Or just something unusual. And so we set ourselves a fun challenge of visitng them all, or at least as many as we could fit into our lifetime. After all Great Britain is not a huge island. How many places could there be?

So with the challenge set we thought about how we should record our adventures. In 2008 we had a reasonably good digital still camera - a Canon EOS 300D. It took good pictures in automatic mode. After all neither of us was a pro photographer. So we decided to write a book using a computer and a word processing programme where we could add the pictures we took. Easy.

After a couple of years of casually visiting places, especially after going up to the Scottish borderlands, we thought that the book idea was going nowhere. No-one was likely to see it and we were getting bored of doing it this way, just for own enjoyment. So we left it in a series of files on a hard drive for a couple of years. We still took pictures like everyone else did on their holidays, but there was nothing special about what we did.

Then in 2012 I started a blog called 'Forgotten Actors' about the more obscure actors in classic films. It was more of a challenge to identify actors in films and produce a place of reference that could be found on the World Wide Web. It was fun and people started to look at it, which was thrilling.

Another few years passed until it clicked that we should be doing the same thing with our experiences in towns and villages across mainland Great Britain. It was easy to do and other people could see it if they wanted to. Since 2004 I've had the means to take digital video and by 2018 the quality was exceptional. So this would be the best way to document our adventures.

The challenge was back on!

So we set out some rules and they are the ones above.

Ian and Lisa