See the bronze doors and museum at the Bunyan Meeting

Walk the Embankment gardens along the Great Ouse

Visit the Higgins Bedford and its Victorian collections

Find the statue of Bunyan at the top of the High Street

John Bunyan came from Elstow near Bedford, joined the nonconformist Bedford Meeting and became a preacher, and out of his years in Bedford came The Pilgrim's Progress; the Bunyan Meeting keeps bronze doors showing scenes from the book and the John Bunyan Museum telling his story. The Great Ouse runs through the middle of the town between long embankment gardens, and the Higgins holds the Handley-Read collection of Victorian decorative art.

Bedford: Bunyan's Town on the Great Ouse

Walk the Bletchley Park estate and the codebreakers' huts of the wartime code-breaking centre

Go into Hut 8, where Alan Turing led the team breaking the German naval Enigma

See the Mansion at the centre of the park, where the Government Code and Cypher School worked

At its peak in January 1945 nearly 9,000 people were working in secret for Bletchley Park, the wartime home of the Government Code and Cypher School, and its outstations. The huts they worked in still stand round the Mansion, and in Hut 8 Alan Turing led the team that broke the German naval Enigma.

Bletchley Park: The Codebreakers' Huts

See the working reconstruction of Colossus, completed in 2008 by Tony Sale and volunteers, being demonstrated

See the WITCH, the Harwell Dekatron computer of 1951, the world's oldest working digital computer, and watch its dekatron memory

Find out why Block H matters: the first purpose-built computer centre in the world, home to six of the ten wartime Colossus machines

Sit down at a BBC Micro in the museum's classroom

The National Museum of Computing opened in 2007 in Block H at Bletchley Park — the first purpose-built computer centre in the world, which housed six of the ten Colossus machines at work at the end of the war — and it has the world's largest collection of working historic computers. Colossus was built to break the German Lorenz cipher: the prototype was working by December 1943, and the Mark 2 first ran on 1 June 1944, just in time for D-Day. A working reconstruction of a Mark 2 was completed in 2008 by Tony Sale and a team of volunteers, and it is demonstrated here. Beside it is the Harwell Dekatron computer, operational from April 1951 and later known as the WITCH, restored here between 2009 and 2012 and recognised by Guinness in 2013 as the world's oldest working digital computer.

The National Museum of Computing: Colossus and the WITCH

Visit the Cromwell Museum in his old grammar school

Walk the riverside and the medieval bridge over the Ouse

Watch for wildfowl from the hides at Grafham's nature reserve

Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon in 1599 and sat for the town in Parliament from 1628; the Cromwell Museum occupies part of the medieval infirmary hall that became the grammar school he and Samuel Pepys attended. About five miles south-west, Grafham Water covers about 630 hectares with a traffic-free circuit round it for bikes and a nature reserve at the western end.

Huntingdon and Grafham Water: Cromwell's Town and a Reservoir Ride

Visit Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, home to one of the world's largest collections of shoes

Find the oldest shoes in the museum collection

Walk the Boot and Shoe Quarter terraces in Northampton

Northampton made boots and shoes for the world: its museum holds one of the largest collections of shoes in the world, and the trade still shows in the factories and the terraces built for the workers. At Wollaston, ten miles away near Wellingborough, the first Dr. Martens boots were made in 1960 at the Griggs factory.

Northamptonshire Boot and Shoe Trail

Tour the house that stood in for Wayne Manor

Walk the formal gardens Lutyens simplified and Gertrude Jekyll's herb garden

Stand on the concert lawn where Oasis played to 250,000 over two nights

Walk the dinosaur trail through the park woods

Knebworth has belonged to the Lytton family since 1490, and the Victorian rebuilding covered the Tudor house in turrets, domes and gargoyles — which is why it was used as Wayne Manor in Batman in 1989. Since 1974 the lawns have held some of the biggest concerts in Britain, from Led Zeppelin to Oasis.

Knebworth: Wayne Manor and the Concert Lawn

Book one of the Silverstone Museum's circuit tours

Go through the Silverstone Museum on the history of British motor racing

Pick out the wartime runways still visible inside the track

Book a track experience or watch a race weekend

Silverstone was a wartime bomber airfield, and the three runways in their classic triangle still lie inside the outline of the track. Racing began informally in 1947 when Maurice Geoghegan and eleven others ran a two-mile course round the deserted airfield — and Geoghegan ran over a sheep that had wandered onto it. The RAC leased the place the next year and laid out a proper circuit, and Silverstone first hosted the British Grand Prix in 1948 and has been its permanent home since 1987. The 1950 British Grand Prix here was the first race of the newly created World Championship of Drivers.

Silverstone: The Home of the British Grand Prix

Walk up onto the Kinder plateau from Edale

Find the trespass plaque at Bowden Bridge quarry

Walk to Kinder Downfall on the western edge

The A57 over Snake Pass opened on 23 August 1821 at a cost of £18,625 and was then the highest turnpike road in England; it is often shut by snow and has been closed for months at a time by landslips. South of it rises Kinder Scout, where on 24 April 1932 Benny Rothman and the British Workers' Sports Federation walked deliberately onto private moor. Some of the trespassers were jailed, and the public outcry that followed made the trespass a symbol of the long campaign for open access that ended with the right to roam in 2000.