Inspiring Travel Writing from Neville Walker
Neville Walker is fascinated by the near abroad, the unexpectedly rewarding and the formerly glamorous, which is why his first published travel article was about Liverpool. He is drawn to the Bauhaus modernity of Stuttgart and prefers Beaulieu to St Tropez. And Opatija to either.
A freelance writer, he specialises mainly in European travel, often focusing on strongly artistic, historical or architectural themes. He has contributed to the Rough Guides to Austria, France, and Provence & the Côte d'Azur, and frequently writes travel features for the Financial Times and Cara - the inflight magazine of Aer Lingus. He has also written for the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and Gay Times, and reviews for the London restaurant guide Square Meal. In 2006, he completed work on the Rough Guides Directions Gran Canaria title.
Born in the west of England, he studied geography at Cambridge and trained as a magazine journalist before being subsumed in the world of public relations, from which he finally emerged in 2000. He lives in London and Austria.
You can see more of Neville's writing on his site: Nevillewalker.com
Articles by Neville Walker
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Berlin: Reprise of a Grossstadt
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Neville Walker
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Germany
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Berlin Region
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Berlin
I’m sitting at a café table at the former Hotel Esplanade on Potsdamer Platz – Berlin’s Piccadilly Circus. The décor is neo-baroque: candles sit in sconces and an ornate mirror hangs above the fireplace. It could...
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Building Stuttgart
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Neville Walker
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Germany
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Baden-Wurttemberg
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Stuttgart
Cheap flights proliferate, but the supply of Pragues is finite. Sooner or later, the avid city break traveller will have seen the gothic churches and toured the baroque palaces. And what then? I went to Stuttgart to find out. I’d been fascinated...
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Gran Canaria: Time Out From the Suntan
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Neville Walker
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Spain
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Canary Islands
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Gran Canaria
When Francisco Franco Bahamonde left Gando Airport in Gran Canaria in a hired British De Havilland Rapide on 18 July 1936, he was on his way to Morocco to start a military rebellion. It became the Spanish Civil War, and brought him 40 years of power...
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Trieste: The Ghost of Empire Past
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Neville Walker
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Italy
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Friuli-Venezia Giulia
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Trieste
I’ve long been susceptible to the celluloid version of Italy: in this idealised country, everything is gold tinted and lovely, like deep fried zucchini flowers or Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow in The Talented Mr Ripley. There is only one car, the...
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Warsaw: The View From a Stalinist Skyscraper
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Neville Walker
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Poland
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Eastern Poland
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Warsaw
They say the viewing platform on the 30th floor of the Palace of Culture and Science is the best place to get a view over Warsaw, and sure enough from its solid, stone-clad colonnades you see the city and its evolution laid out beneath you like a...
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Budapest: The Shock of the Old
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Neville Walker
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Hungary
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Budapest Region
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Budapest
I was born in 1963, but celebrated my 40th birthday in 1936. Or at least that’s how it seemed at the time. I’d traveled halfway across Europe to meet up with fifteen of my closest friends and relatives. They descended on Budapest from Dublin, London...
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Stuttgart: Art and Architecture
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Neville Walker
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Germany
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Baden-Wurttemberg
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Stuttgart
You’re heading across town in a big, silver car. It’s late. The traffic is light, and it’s moving through the city smoothly and quickly. The roadway dips as you enter a tunnel. Momentarily something catches your attention: up ahead the tunnel roof...
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Hamburg
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Neville Walker
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Germany
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Hamburg Region
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Hamburg
Just off the Reeperbahn in the heart of Hamburg’s infamous St Pauli district there’s a small, rather scruffy square. The morning after the night before, it’s likely to be decorated with the broken glass and used syringe detritus of the area’s seedy...
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Nuremberg
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Neville Walker
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Germany
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Bavaria
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Nuremberg
The film opens with a shot of towering summer clouds in a brilliant sky, viewed from the aircraft ploughing through them and accompanied by stirring music. It cuts to a thrilling flypast of church steeples, dormered rooftops and a medieval castle on...
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Gdansk
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Neville Walker
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Poland
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Baltic Coast
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Gdansk
I approached Gdañsk with some trepidation, wondering if it could bear the weight of expectation generated by its glorious mercantile past and by the wonders I’d seen in other Hanseatic towns along the Baltic’s south coast – Wismar, Stralsund, even...