From Sea to Shining Sea and a few museums on the side

I've so far lived in Cambridge for thirteen years, in Winchester for five at boarding school, in Oxford for four at college, and will probably stay in Nottingham for grad school three years.

You will notice, having read the title for this page, that none of those cities can be described as coastal, or even littoral. Fortunately, thanks to a long list of people starting with Isambard Kingdom Brunel and continuing via Orville Wright, and thanks to the liberal holidays at British schools and universities, it's not hard to get to cities which are coastal.

I feared there'd be a problem finding places to stay in popular cities: enter Hostelling International, who offer a bed, a locker and a communal kitchen for under $20 a night in pleasant regions no more than a ten-minute walk from the centres of the towns. Of the six or seven that I've stayed in, I'd only advise against the Washington DC one, whose beds seem to play host to a variety of student-eating wildlife.

Two of my favourite cities (to be continued)

I suppose I should mention right at the start that this is a list horribly biased towards exotic places: I visited Washington DC before I saw Nottingham for the first time, Paris before Plymouth, and Seattle before Sheffield. Also, I've left my collection of paper photos at home, so have picked only cities I could illustrate digitally.

Washington DC: hardly on the coast, and with very threatening streets - broad, empty, with derelict buildings on the sides, within five blocks of the Capitol - this city makes up for that by having some of the most impressive museums in the world, and some wonderful pieces of public architecture. I was there on July 4th in 1999, and got to see American patriotic fervour at its best; there's something starkly terrifying about standing among three hundred thousand people with hands on hearts singing The Star-Spangled Banner.

Oxford: for a suitable aesthetic sense, one of the most beautiful cities in Britain. I can't be objective about the place - I spent four years there, in the college that you see on the right, and it's profoundly affected my baseline - but I will shortly, once I've assembled the pictures, have more photos to show the world what I like about it.