Afternoon,
Due to various circumstances, I'm completely in charge of the holidays for my children this year (3 of them, aged 8-13). DH has various work related commitments coming up, so we've decided that I will book what I feel like for us, and if he's able to join us, he will. Slight catch - we won't have the car. I'm happy to travel by train, and we've done a number of city and coast day trips and short breaks by train, and have one city break planned already for this year, to Liverpool. I'd like to keep it to the UK ideally. We may have a Eurostar trip at some point, but the last couple of years we've had holidays abroad, and I like the idea of staying at home.
I'm finding it easy to come up with ideas for cities and various coastal resorts, but I'm wondering if there are less obvious places that are reachable by train that we should consider, either for a day trip or a short break. Any recommendations? For reference, we've been to Birmingham, York, Southend, Brighton, Great Yarmouth, Hastings, St Albans, Canterbury, Rochester, Whitstable, Margate and Stratford-upon-Avon among others in recent years. I'm maybe looking for smaller, quieter seaside resorts, or smaller cities and towns which maybe have some interesting museums, or walks, or parks, or are particularly pretty and easy to amuse ourselves. Happy to do hotels, caravan parks, apartments or house. Probably not camping (don't fancy lugging the gear) but maybe one of those glamping type places could work. We can get to any central London mainline station pretty easily, so hopefully we should be able to get to most places without too many problems. Don't mind a long-ish journey if there's somewhere good we can stay for a few days.
All recommendations welcome! If we don't use them this year, can always keep them in mind for the future.