Give Britain a break

Britain is family phobic. Are you kidding?

By Guardian unlimited travel /News 10:14am

Give Britain a break, says Dea Birkett. It's cleaner, safer and more family-friendly than you remember

The kids are alright ... enjoying beachlife in Cornwall. Photograph: Linda Nylind

Oh, for the joys of a little café in the square in Sienna, where the waiter whips away your two-year-old, taking them into the kitchen to play with the sous chef. Meanwhile, you two adults are left to sup on tagliatelli alla vongole and wonder at how family friendly that quaint place we call The Continent is. And, of course, mutter favourable comparisons over your Chianti with that dreadful child-shunning Britain.

This all too common cliché has been revived again. In a survey of 2,000 parents by Mother and Baby magazine and Mothercare, holidays in Britain have been condemned as "far from family friendly". So far, in fact, it's better to go abroad.

Like every cliché, this contains a grain of tourist truth. But only a grain. Britain simply isn't the dirty, child-shunning place it once, sadly, was. A high chair is no longer a rare piece of furniture in a restaurant. An extra pull-down bed in your hotel room won't cost at least £20. Travelling up and down the country with my small tribe - two six-year-olds and a teenager - I've been increasingly and pleasantly surprised at how family-friendly Britain has become.

Admittedly, you're more likely to find an Italian running the café in Cornwall than anyone brought up in Bude, which does help. But even if a native Cornish speaker is still landlord at the local pub, I guarantee he'll welcome you far more than his predecessor ever did.

You don't have to go to CenterParcs or Alton Towers to find a place your family will feel wanted. I recently took mine to Windsor for the weekend. We stayed at the Runnymede hotel, right by the birthplace of the Magna Carta, in a family room that easily accommodated all five of us. Even the hotel's best restaurant offered decent children's meals, not just chips with reconstituted meat

This town on the Thames has swans, and all along the river bank cafes sold small bags of bread for 50p to feed them. That's a cheap afternoon outing by any standards, including Greek or Spanish. There was even a castle. What more could a family want? If it's friendly Italian waiters, then Windsor is full of them.

And for the quarter of respondents on the survey who found food at holiday camps poor or awful, perhaps they should examine their vacationing priorities. If it's all-night entertainment for you and all-day entertainment for the kids you want, then a holiday camp is ideal. But no one in their right mind would choose to go to Butlins or Pontins for the cuisine. I doubt even the holiday camps themselves would make that claim.

For the almost two-thirds who declared Britain unsafe, do they really think a week in Bournemouth opens your family to more risks than a week in Barcelona? And to the 65% who said Britain is a dirty destination - have they never looked at the floor in a Spanish tapas bar? It's all litter, sawdust and macerated olives.

A little predictably, America is held up as the great family-friendly destination. But this is a place that doesn't welcome kids at all; it entirely segregates them, in a kind of age apartheid. Every restaurant has a special kids' menu, usually one you can colour in. (Half-size portions from the a la carte are the healthier option, and one that more and more British restaurants are offering.) America even has special "Children's Museums", as if high art were too good for them. In fact, at New York's world famous Frick Collection, anyone aged under 10 is banned.

So why don't we stop whinging and give Britain a break? It's cleaner, safer and far more family-friendly than you remember.