AS BREXIT negotiations swirled onwards – with no-one quite sure what was happening or where it would all end up – Tom Chesshyre set forth on trains from London to visit the place that Britain said it was intending to leave: Europe.
With Winston Churchill’s post Second World War words about Britain needing to be part of “a kind of United States of Europe” framing his journey, he begins at Victoria station and is soon at Dover, before hopping on a ferry and travelling onwards from Calais (where he meets stranded immigrants) to Lille, Bruges and Maastricht, where the much-discussed (of late) EU treaty was signed.
After sitting at the table where the signatures were scrawled back in 1992, his train adventure takes him to Bonn, Leipzig and into Poland, where he visits coal mining towns, before reaching Krakow and travelling yet further eastwards to Ukraine and the Black Sea at Odessa. Invading Russian troops are just 100 miles away across the water – a sign of the fragility of the times.
As his random journey rolls on – he’s never quite sure where the next stop will be – Chesshyre embraces “slow travel” and finds time to look into the troubled state of so many European countries, where populist leaders are coming to the fore from Hungary to Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Italy. Churchill’s comments about the need for European togetherness, he finds, seem more relevant than ever.
Railways connect Europe, but if Europe falls apart – as divisive forces arise – will it be so easy to get around in the future? With Britain on the cusp on saying “goodbye” (or will it change its mind?) the importance of the Continent – and Britain’s post-war place in it – is one of the key talking points of the times.
Join Chesshyre for a trackside view, with many an encounter along the way with conductors, communists, refugees, drop-outs, professors, poets, politicians and – of course – train lovers.
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PRAISE FOR SLOW TRAINS TO VENICE: A LOVE LETTER TO EUROPE:
‘Like the trains he travels on, Tom Chesshyre meanders through Europe and the result is entertaining and enjoyable.’
(Christian Wolmar, author of Blood, Iron and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World)
‘At a time when European unity is fraying at an alarming rate, here comes Tom Chesshyre’s travelogue to remind us of the virtues of connectedness. Better still, his explorations are made by train, and use the Continent’s historic, unpredictable routes from the era before high-speed rail. A diverting and thought-provoking read.’
(Simon Bradley, author of The Railways)
‘Far from being just another train travelogue, Slow Trains to Venice combines reports from a Europe on the brink of major change with amusing vignettes… An essential read.’
(Tom Otley, editor of Business Traveller magazine)
‘An engaging picaresque series of encounters and reflections on Europe as many of its countries struggle to find common ground amid the populist reaction to its dilemmas’
(Anthony Lambert, author of Lost Railway Journeys from Around the World)
‘Beethoven with attitude, masochism in Lviv, the smell of cigarettes in the corridor, adventurous great aunts who travelled on the roofs of crowded trains, Carniolan pork-garlic sausage, Jimi Hendrix in the Slovene Ethnographic Museum and, of course, the 13:49 from Wrocław. Tom Chesshyre pays homage to a Europe that we are leaving behind and perhaps never understood. Che bella corsa! He is the master of slow locomotion.’
(Roger Boyes, The Times)
‘Meander through Europe in the excellent company of Tom Chesshyre, who relishes the joys of slow travel and seizes every opportunity that a journey presents: drifting as a flâneur in Lille, following in the tracks of James Joyce in a literary exploration of Ljubljana, cosseted in luxury on a trans-Ukrainian express, all decorated with a wealth of detail and intrigue.
As Tom discovers, it’s not just Brexit Britain – the whole Continent is in disarray. But at least Europe’s railways still bind us together.’
(Simon Calder, The Independent)
‘One of the most engaging and enterprising of today’s travel writers, Chesshyre has an eye ever-alert for telling detail and balances the romance of train travel with its sometimes-challenging realities… but for all its good humour, the book impresses as a poignant elegy for the Europe which Britain once embraced’
(Stephen McClarence, travel writer, Daily Telegraph and The Times)
‘On his pre-Brexit tour of everything we might be losing Tom finds the same response almost everywhere he goes: Why on earth did you do this? We wish you hadn’t. But also the same questions seem to worry his slow train fellow travellers everywhere he goes: immigration is certainly one of them and wasn’t that a big factor for the Brexit movement?’
(Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet guidebooks)