The reality of a road trip around England’s edges — by electric car
It had been a good day’s driving. All that was needed was to find a hotel in Eastbourne, preferably one with a charging point for an electric car. “Is it a buggy?” the receptionist wondered. “No, it’s a car,” I assured her. “One of those scooter things?” she asked. “It’s a car. It goes on the road. Driven hundreds of miles in it.” Turning all compassionate and empathetic she told me not to worry — she’d arrange for us to charge it in our hotel room.
My wife, Joan, and I were on a 1,900-mile odyssey driving around England’s edges. Nothing extraordinary about that, you might think, except that we were doing it by electric vehicle (EV). When we did the trip, pre-pandemic, electric cars were more of a novelty — but this was the future, the government was saying. We wanted to be ahead of the curve, embarking on a journey that has now been turned into a book.
Approaching our 80th birthdays we needed a challenge, so we hit on the idea of driving our Nissan Leaf around England. It would be scary, we knew. Back then there were even fewer charging points than today. Would we make it to the next one? Would it be in working order? Would someone else be using it? With our limited range we’d need to recharge every 70 to 80 miles.
The Long Man of Wilmington, northwest of Eastbourne
GETTY IMAGES
When we looked into it we realised that we couldn’t quite cover all of England’s edges — for a start there weren’t enough charging points in the Welsh borderlands region. But the journey we eventually undertook — a round trip from our home near Berwick-upon-Tweed — did take us along the border with Scotland, south to Liverpool then across the country again to drive pretty much all the way down the east coast to Kent, before taking a slightly more direct route back.
There were tense moments along the way as we sought out those charging points. Humorous ones too (as the episode in Eastbourne illustrated). But for an adventure, as we approached such milestone birthdays, it was electric.
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After the ragged severity of the Scottish Borders and the moody edges of the Solway Firth, the road south took us through the Cumbrian coastal towns of Maryport, Workington and Whitehaven. Sandwiched between the sea and the Lake District, they have the best of both worlds here — seaside and mountains; a glorious part of England.
It wasn’t so great when it came to charging the car, though. In Workington we struggled for an hour in the dark and rain to get the charging point to work. And not even the helpline could kick-start it. “The next one’s at Whitehaven,” the woman on the line told us. So on we sped. The charging point in the delightful Georgian harbour town worked beautifully and, with a new spring in our steps (along with the motor), we enjoyed a stroll around the marina.
Our journey took us through many of the northern communities whose people had felt somehow betrayed by the ruling classes in London and decided to give them a kick in the teeth when the time came for the Brexit vote. In the market town of Broughton-in-Furness we met Roger, who was manning the tourist information centre. “The trouble with those people in London was that they didn’t know we existed,” he told us.
When it comes to feeling left behind, the Lancashire towns of Blackpool and Morecambe — long eclipsed as premier tourist destinations, since the advent of air travel opened up cheap bucket-and-spade breaks in the Med — have felt it more than most. It was a sunny day when we arrived at the latter, but as we walked from the car park through gloomy streets and past tired terrace houses, it seemed to be a rather downtrodden town — and Blackpool had clearly seen better days.
We made it as far as Liverpool, and the faded splendour of the Adelphi Hotel, before crossing back to Berwick to tackle the full length of the English east coast.
From Holy Island to Whitby, a rich vein of ecclesiastical history intermingles with the fading relics of our Industrial Revolution. St Cuthbert’s Island, St Paul’s Monastery at Jarrow, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Lindisfarne Gospels, St Hilda of Hartlepool and Whitby — this whole stretch of coast is the birthplace of the English story.
The town of Maryport
ALAMY
The road south from Teesside took us over the Cleveland Hills and squeezed itself between the edges of the North York Moors and the North Sea — a scenically stunning drive. As usual our main concern was finding a charger. We eventually found a Pod Point rapid charger at the Lidl in Scarborough. The touch-screen informed us that we needed an app to use it; the signal was poor and it froze mid-download, several times — it happens frequently, the helpline told us.
Much of the Lincolnshire coast is an unbroken 50-mile expanse of sandy beaches. In Cleethorpes we had afternoon tea on the pier, where Papa’s claimed to be the largest fish-and-chips shop in the country. Further on, Sutton-on-Sea prided itself on being an “amusement-and-arcade-free” resort.
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In Norfolk we passed through stately Sandringham; in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, we tuned into the heart of England’s musical establishment.
Across the noisy and cantankerous Dartford Crossing we finally arrived in Canterbury, whose cathedral stands at the centre of Christian England — notorious for its ecclesiastical murder and famed for the tales that pilgrims told on their way there from Winchester.
By then we had plenty of tales of our own. The Leaf was not a long-distance car, but limiting ourselves to about 80 miles a day, exploring parts of the country we didn’t know, and having great conversations with strangers, made this a thoroughly enjoyable experience. To conserve battery power we kept to 50-55mph, went easy on the accelerator and avoided braking as much as possible.
There’s a desperate need to standardise charging points — and even today, five years on from our trip, there are still too few of them, particularly around the edges of England. We now have a longer-range EV and would never go back to petrol or diesel.
At that Eastbourne hotel Amanda, the receptionist, squealed with delight when she discovered that our car was not a buggy and I was as fit as a fiddle.
Charging Around: Exploring the Edges of England by Electric Car by Clive Wilkinson is published by Eye Books (£9.99)
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