The Battle of Britain was fought over south-east England in 1940, and its places are still there: Dover, RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Kenley, RAF Hornchurch, RAF Tangmere and the underground Uxbridge bunker.
The route follows the summer of 1940 from the Dunkirk headquarters at Dover Castle through the Kent and Sussex fighter fields, which were bombed in August, to the operations room where Churchill watched 15 September. Many sites are now museums, parks or airports.
The Crown rarely filmed where its story is set: Lancaster House played Buckingham Palace, Ely and Winchester cathedrals played Westminster Abbey and St Paul's, Cobham Hall played Eton, and Downing Street was built at Elstree Studios.
This route visits five of those stand-ins, from season one to season five, and says what each one played.
For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West.
The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
In 1868, at the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution, twin Assassins Jacob and Evie Frye come to a London controlled by the Templars under Crawford Starrick, and set out to take the city back: building their street gang, the Rooks, across an open world of seven Victorian boroughs. Jacob works through Starrick's lieutenants while Evie hunts a Piece of Eden, the Shroud, from St Paul's to the Tower to a vault under Buckingham Palace.
This route follows both threads across the capital, then jumps forward: to Whitechapel in 1888, where Evie hunts Jack the Ripper in the expansion, and to Tower Bridge in 1916, where Jacob's granddaughter Lydia clears a German spy nest at Churchill's request. Every stop is a real building or district you can walk to.
