Britain, nationalism and the complicated joy of vacationing in your own country

Time to find the hidden beauty just beyond our doorsteps. People across the world have stayed a lot closer to home for holidays thanks to the pandemic and have been happily surprised by the discovery of a wealth of culture and history in their home ground. Travel writer Henry Wismayer always believed he had to go abroad for a delightful holiday. The pandemic gave him a new reason to test that old thinking. Here, he reflects on what traveling around his motherland taught him about England’s complicated national identity. “As I walked along the shoreline, sandals dangling in my fingers, I pondered whether the immobility of recent months had reset my aesthetic threshold. Over the past year, confined to my London neighborhood, I had often sought solace in local streets and parklands, seeking diversion in the familiar, the overlooked, the intangible ebb and evolution of places I’d always known.”