Norwich has a flourishing art, music and cultural scene; the city is abundant with theatres, museums and art galleries. The haphazard street layout of the historic city makes a stroll thoroughly enjoyable. You can also visit the city’s cathedral, castle (above) or clock tower for a more historic insight into the town.

Norwich is one of UNESCO's few Cities of Literature, earned due to its rich heritage and current endeavours to promote literature. In 2014 the city promoted the joys of literature and heritage during a 12-week campaign in the summer called City of Stories, which explored the city’s local culture in depth with a different theme each week (for example spires and ziggurats), moving beyond ink and paper to tell local stories through buildings, people, food and shops.

The title is well-deserved. Authors have flocked to Norwich, following a tradition that dates back to the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, who lived in the city during the 13th and 14th centuries and was the first woman to write and publish a book in the English language. Modern versions of the text, The Revelations of Divine Love, are still widely read, and the church where Julian lived is still open for visitors today. The first parliamentary debate publisher Luke Hansard was born and lived in Norwich in the 1750s, and generation-defining novelists such as WG Sebald and Anna Sewell (author of Black Beauty) made Norwich their abode.

Writers, novelists and poets come from all over the world to speak at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival each May, at the Worlds Literature Festival each June, and at the UEA Literary Festivals each season. The current City of Stories initiative is spearheaded by Writers’ Centre Norwich, which also organises regular workshops, literary salons and reading events, many of them free, that ensure Norwich’s literary community don’t go too stir crazy in their various writing nooks. Meanwhile the Norfolk & Norwich Millennium Library was voted the most popular library in the UK seven years in a row from 2006 to 2013.

The city is also home to the University of East Anglia and its prestigious creative writing department, established in 1970 by the writer Malcom Bradbury and purveyor of the longest-running creative writing MA in England. Literature professors in the 2013-14 academic year included Margaret Atwood, James Lasdun, Giles Foden and Amit Chaudhuri, appointments that attract students from across the world to study at the institution. Graduates include Ian McEwan, Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize and the 2014 Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction, and Rose Tremain, multi-prizewinning novelist and the university’s current chancellor.

As a relatively remote outpost within the UK (nearest cities Peterborough, Cambridge and Ipswich are all over 45 miles away), Norwich has carved a place in history all of its own and so is well worth the travel time to visit. The surrounding Norfolk countryside and coastal areas with some of the most beautiful, unique and bounteous parks, gardens, wildlife sanctuaries and natural habitats the UK has to offer. Whether it be the majesty of Holkham Hall, the picturesque villages of Downham Market and Holt or the reserves at Cromer, Sheringham and Wells-next-the-Sea, or the Norfolk Broads themselves - large sweeping expanses of water - there are countless ways to interact with nature and heritage, discuss conservation or have fun in the outdoors.

Great Yarmouth's herring industry saw a spectacular boom in the 19th century. Famously, Robinson Crusoe-author Daniel Defoe thought Great Yarmouth 'infinitely superior to Norwich'.  Today, the quayside and the ‘little palaces’ he so admired, is at the heart of Yarmouth’s Heritage Quarter and also where you'll find the town’s excellent museums. This lived-in, walkable town is packed with historic buildings from stunning lengths of medieval town wall to the largest parish church in England, and from the quaint Fishermen's Hospital to the imposing town hall. Yarmouth is also home to England’s second ‘Nelson’s column’.

King’s Lynn was one of England’s most important ports. Home to medieval markets and fairs, centre for religion and learning, and trading partner to the Hanseatic merchants of northern Germany and the Baltic, Lynn’s wealth came mostly from trade  through the years in salt, grain, wool, wine and coal.