Marlow

Michelin pubs and the Butcher's Tap

West Street runs through the middle of Marlow and holds, within a few hundred yards of each other, a pub with two Michelin stars, a pub with one, and the house where Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein. The pubs both belong to Tom Kerridge, who opened The Hand & Flowers with Beth Kerridge in 2005 and made it the first pub in the country to hold two Michelin stars. Lunch there is £55 for two courses, and it climbs steeply from there. A few doors down, The Coach holds one star and works from a menu of small British plates; you can no longer just walk in, so book.

Kerridge's third venue, the Butcher's Tap and Grill on Spittal Street, is more straightforward: you choose a cut of meat from the butcher's counter and it is grilled to order. There is a small garden in summer.

Historic pubs by the bridge

If you would rather your pub simply be a pub, the Two Brewers on St Peter Street has been one since 1727. It keeps four changing cask ales, welcomes well-behaved dogs in the bar and garden, and prints a menu for them as well as for you. Jerome K. Jerome wrote part of Three Men in a Boat here. St Peter Street itself, which the Chilterns National Landscape calls "the oldest and most picturesque street," runs down to the water's edge. The Ship on West Street is older still, established in 1580, a wooden-beamed room that now serves pizzas and stays open to midnight.

St Peter Street brings you out by the river, which is where Marlow arranges itself. William Tierney Clark's suspension bridge, opened in 1833, spans the Thames just below the weir; Clark went on to build the Széchenyi Chain Bridge in Budapest to a similar design. Beside it stands All Saints' church, its tall spire visible across the water. The medieval church that stood here was demolished after repeated flooding and rebuilt in the 1830s in Perpendicular Gothic, with a Willis organ added in 1876.

River and woodland walks

From the churchyard the Thames Path is signed toward Cookham, about five and a half level miles past Marlow Lock and riverside meadows to the Stanley Spencer Gallery. You can walk one way and return by train in roughly sixteen minutes, or by Salter's Steamers if the timing suits. For something hillier, the six-mile Marlow Circular climbs into Chiltern beech and cherry woodland past Saxon earthworks and Quarry Wood.

Park, museum and connections

The town centre sits back from the river around Higginson Park, a riverside green with Marlow Museum in it. The station is the end of the branch line to Maidenhead known locally as the Marlow Donkey; from there it is about an hour and a quarter to Paddington. By road Marlow is around thirty-three miles from London via the A404(M) and M4. Buses run through the centre.

Regatta and Swan Upping

In June the regatta fills the water with rowing boats, and in July the Royal Swan Upping passes through on its way upriver. The swans are counted, marked and released, and the town watches from the bridge while the Thames carries on underneath.