Plymouth
What to see
You’ll find accounts of Plymouth’s tourist attractions plus information on shopping, eating out etc at Visit Plymouth or Visit South Devon.
Links to Plymouth attractions include:
● Elizabethan House
● Mayflower Museum
● Merchant’s House
● National Marine Aquarium
● Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery
● Plymouth Gin Distillery
● Royal Citadel
● Sherlock Holmes Pavement
Towns of Two Halves extracts
● “Plymouth called for a special excursion. Meandering aimlessly around the Internet in the wool-gathering way that is the Internet’s great contribution to productivity, I discovered that train tickets booked sufficiently far in advance were an irresistible bargain.”
● “Post-war austerity in the UK didn’t run to the painstaking recreation of medieval city centres.”
● “I neglected most of the internationally-famous attractions of Britain’s Ocean City: the National Marine Aquarium, the Gin Distillery, the Mayflower Museum, the City Museum & Art Gallery, the Merchant’s House, the Royal Citadel… This list, by no means comprehensive, shames me. Instead I ambled around the city with a bag of chips.”
● “Perhaps the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed strongly in the after-life, guided my steps to the west of the city centre. On an unexceptional street a number of short quotations from Sherlock Holmes books are set into the pavement. Eventually a plaque explains that in 1882 Conan Doyle practised medicine from a building (no longer there) at 1 Dumford (now Durnford) Street. He appears to have lived there no longer than six months, and it isn’t clear whether he did any writing in that time – the first Sherlock Holmes story wasn’t published until 1887. But the plaque concludes: ‘A Holmes cult arose and still flourishes today.'”
These are taken from the Plymouth chapter of Towns of Two Halves, published in 2018. To buy a copy, email info@townsof2halves.co.uk.