Culture, coast and community from the South West
A Sunday roast tastes better when you have earned it. These ten South West pubs pair proper gravy with short winter walks — coast path, riverbank, common or moor — plus the unwritten rules for booking, boots and leaving room for crumble.
From Devon lanes to Dorset valleys, volunteer-run pop-up cinemas are turning village halls into the warmest rooms on a winter night. Here are ten South West halls worth watching — plus how to catch a December 2026 or January 2027 screening.
Forget the tribute act. This month the South West is serving up library soundbaths, chapel singalongs and gigs in spaces that smell faintly of the sea. Here are ten warm, weird and affordable nights out.
Toasters, torn hiking jackets and stubborn lamps are getting a second life at repair cafés across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset. More importantly, so are the people who bring them in.
Can a tenner still buy a proper cultural day out in South West England? We spent November 2026 testing the idea from Exeter to Falmouth — cinema seats, museum donations, second-hand paperbacks, bakery stops and a village-hall gig — and found that small budgets can still feel generous.
The seaside arcade is a strange, bright, noisy kind of community centre. As several South West arcades face another winter of rising costs and thinning crowds, we visit the rooms where 2p coins still buy a few minutes of joy — and ask what their slow decline says about the coast.
Forget rushing from A to B. Across Devon and Cornwall, the region’s community rail lines are slow, scenic and quietly brilliant days out in their own right. Here’s where to ride, what to do at the end of the platform and how to keep fares sensible in autumn 2026.
Across Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, a new generation of growers and makers is treating cider as an orchard product rather than a volume business. The result is drier, stranger and more interesting – and it is changing the way rural pubs and young drinkers think about the West Country’s oldest tipple.
As the mercury drops, thousands of people across the South West are heading the other way — into the sea, rivers and lidos. We meet the groups making winter dips social, safe and surprisingly joyful.
Forget the generic Christmas market crawl. From masked solstice parades in Penzance to cider-soaked wassails in Somerset, the South West has a winter calendar packed with odd, lovely, community-rooted traditions. Here are ten to seek out this season.