'I'm a travel expert - one beautiful British beach belongs on Australia coastline'
A travel expert has revealed one special beach that will steal a place in British tourists' hearts - and they don't even have to leave the country.
Countless Brits fantasise about jetting off to Australia to bask on its iconic beaches. But the hefty price tag for a flight down under can be daunting.
Thankfully, there's no need to dig deep into your pockets for adventure on sandy beaches worthy of a place in Australia. Britain boasts its own stunning shores that rival the famed golden coasts of Australia, as Travel guru Annabel Symonds explains.
Annabel, co-founder of Londoner in Sydney, has revealed that Scotland 's Luskentyre Beach on Harris Island bears an uncanny resemblance to Queensland Beach in Australia's Whitsundays. She exclaimed: "That's right, Luskentyre Beach on Harris Island in Scotland reminds us of one of the best beaches in the world."
Renowned for its shimmering clear turquoise waters, Luskentyre Beach offers a tropical vibe that belies its Scottish location, complemented by pristine white sands that form a dramatic contrast with the sea, reports the Express. The beach's sand is celebrated for its soft, powdery quality, enhancing the beach's allure and providing the perfect spot for sunbathing, picnicking, or unwinding with a book.
And let's not forget the picturesque Scottish hills in the background, offering a scenic vista that makes Luskentyre Beach an ideal destination for photographers looking to capture some truly spectacular shots. Adventurous visitors often trek up Beinn Dhubh, the nearby hills, to snag the ultimate photo of the stunning azure waters.
Annabel remarked: "This Scottish beach has water so bright that you'll think you're sailing on the Whitsundays. If you're lucky, you might even spot some seals and if you're very lucky, see deer wandering around on this beach too."
Seals are sometimes observed lounging on nearby rocks at Luskentyre Beach, whilst visitors may also encounter dolphins, red deer or golden eagles, making it an ideal spot for wildlife watching. The beach has earned recognition as one of Europe's "most stunning" coastal destinations by Lonely Planet and has also claimed the title of Beach of the Year in the Countryfile Magazine Awards.
The stretch of sand sits adjacent to the village of Luskentyre, a tranquil hamlet peppered with white stone cottages. Residents occasionally provide horseback excursions along the shoreline.
Visitors can browse the beachside hut shop offering refreshments and ice cream alongside local gifts and artwork showcasing regional craftsmanship. The nearby Cake Shed café serves freshly baked treats and scones.
The beach benefits from its proximity to Tarbert, Harris's principal ferry terminal, where tourists can discover numerous eateries, cafés, shops and the renowned Isle of Harris Distillery. What sets Luskentyre Beach apart as an exceptional destination is its relative seclusion compared to other celebrated coastlines.
This allows guests to savour the scenery undisturbed and, crucially, at a fraction of the cost of a trip abroad. If you're seeking an extraordinary destination, then Luskentyre Beach is certainly worth considering for a visit.
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New Statesman
3 hours ago
- New Statesman
Berlin's dark past and me
The platform was empty. It was a serene scene: the rain had stopped and the air smelled green, the trees showering droplets each time the wind blew. My mother and I carefully stepped around the puddles as we read the plaques on the very edge of the platform. 18.10.1941 / 1251 Juden / Berlin – Lodz. 29.11.1942 / 1000 Juden / Berlin – Auschwitz. 2.2.1945 / 88 Juden / Berlin – Theresienstadt. The Gleis 17 (Platform 17) memorial at Grunewald station on the western outskirts of Berlin commemorates the 50,000 Jews who were deported from the city to concentration camps by the Nazis. There are 186 steel plaques in total, in chronological order, each detailing the number of deportees and where they went. Vegetation has been left to grow around the platform and over the train tracks, 'a symbol that no train will ever leave the station at this track again', according to the official Berlin tourist website. Were we tourists? I wasn't sure. I paused at one plaque in particular: 5.9.1942 / 790 Juden / Berlin – Riga. My great-grandmother, Ryfka, was one of the 790 Jews deported to Riga on 5 September 1942. She was murdered three days later. Her husband, Max, had been arrested and taken as a labourer to the Siedlce ghetto the previous year. In 1942 he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. When I told people we were taking a family trip to Berlin, many brought up Jesse Eisenberg's 2024 film A Real Pain (released January 2025 in the UK), in which Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play mismatched cousins on a tour of Poland, confronting the inherited trauma of their grandmother's Holocaust survival story. But when we first started planning our trip six years ago, that wasn't the idea at all. It wasn't supposed to be about Max and Ryfka. It was about their daughter, my grandmother, Mirjam, and my grandfather, Ali, whom we called Opa. Opa's ancestry enabled us to claim German citizenship. My mother, sister and I started this process in 2017 without really thinking about it. The UK had voted to leave the EU, and Brits with relatives from all over were looking for ways to retain an EU passport. The Global Citizenship Observatory estimates that 90,000 Brits have acquired a second passport from an EU country since 2016, not counting those eligible for Irish citizenship. Article 116(2) of the German Constitution states: 'Persons who surrendered, lost or were denied German citizenship between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds are entitled to naturalisation.' The same applies to their descendants. Mirjam died in 1990, before I was born, and Opa in 2003 – both British and only British citizens. But we had his voided German passport, his birth certificate, the notice of statelessness he'd received when he came to England in 1936. It took two years, but on 3 June 2019, the three of us attended the embassy in Belgravia and were solemnly dubbed citizens of Germany. We received our passports a few weeks later. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe My mother wanted to celebrate with a trip to Berlin – the city where her parents grew up, and which my sister and I had never visited. Five years later than planned, thanks to Covid travel bans, we made it, honouring Opa by sweeping through immigration on the passports he had posthumously gifted us. I was prepared for the attempts at schoolgirl German, the arguments over bus timetables, itineraries and whether or not it was acceptable to fare-dodge on the U-Bahn. What I wasn't prepared for was being struck down by tears on a suburban street, faced with the reality of how exactly I had come to be there and what my presence meant. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Photo by Jon Arnold Images Ltd My grandfather's family made it out of Nazi Germany. So did my grandmother and her siblings. Her parents did not. Max and Ryfka were typical middle-class Berliners, owners of a profitable cigarette factory. They had three children: Fanny, Mirjam and Harry. The family lived in a five-storey apartment block with a dramatic art nouveau facade – an open-mouthed deity staring down as residents came and went – on Thomasiusstrasse, on the edge of the Tiergarten city park. Around the corner, in the same affluent neighbourhood, lived the boy who would become my grandfather, Ali. They used to play together as children. Two decades, multiple emigrations and an internment in Canada later, Ali married Mirjam. My mother was born two years later. I know all this thanks to her, her sister and their cousins. A few years before the Brexit vote, they had set out to consolidate everything we know about the family – sifting through documents, photos and letters, sharing recollections of their parents, writing down everything so the story would not be forgotten. I know, for example, that the basement of the house in Thomasiusstrasse was used for meetings of their Zionist youth movement long before emigration became an urgent issue. I know when and how the siblings fled Berlin to what was then British-occupied Palestine: Fanny going first to Denmark in July 1937, then to Palestine in February 1939, where she worked at the first haute couture fashion house in Israel. Mirjam left in April 1936 via a boat from Italy. She studied horticulture before eventually marrying Ali in 1951 and moving to England. Harry arrived in Palestine on 1 September 1937, his 16th birthday. And I know, from the letters we have, how often and how seriously all three urged their parents to sell the cigarette factory and leave Berlin, before it was too late. On the pavement outside the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, set into the cobblestones, gleamed the Stolpersteine. Any visitor to Berlin will find the streets scattered with these 'stumbling stones', small brass plates, each one a memorial to a victim of the Nazis who lived at that address: their name, year of birth, where and when they were killed. The commemorative art project, begun in 1992 by artist Gunter Demnig, has spread across Europe: there now are more than 116,000 stones, in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine for Max and Ryfka were laid in August 2014. My mother and her family attended; a clarinettist played klezmer music. There are eight stones for that single apartment block. The day before we visited, my mother had booked us on a tour of the Jewish quarter. Our guide told us that the aim of the Stolpersteine initiative was to compel confrontation and reflection, causing passers-by to stumble, both figuratively and physically, over this dark period of European history. Berlin is forthright about confronting its past – using art and architecture in innovative ways to do so. At the Holocaust memorial by the Brandenburg Gate, visitors get lost in an unnerving maze of concrete slabs. At the entrance to the Jewish Museum, the floors slope and the walls are set at odd angles, making the space difficult to navigate with confidence. The 'Garden of Exile' just outside the museum, designed by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind to capture the disorientation of the refugee experience, is similarly slanted and boxed in by columns. The day we visited, it was raining again, the uneven cobbles slick and treacherous. The garden was empty. I slipped – and through my perhaps disproportionate tears realised there was a lot more to my new German passport than I had imagined. Everyone knows about the Holocaust. Six million Jews, more than a quarter of a million Gypsies, millions more Poles, Soviets, homosexuals and people with disabilities, systematically exterminated at death camps. I had always known that my family was in some way linked to it all, that the Holocaust was why we were in Britain in the first place, that I wouldn't be here were it not for my maternal grandparents being 'denied German citizenship… due to persecution on political, racial or religious grounds'. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled the Nazis. Every Jewish family I know has a story: of how their ancestors escaped, and what happened to the ones who didn't. I knew long before I visited Berlin that there is nothing special about my family's history. But I had always seen it as just that: history. The Jewish Museum's core exhibition charts the history of Jews in Germany from medieval times to the present day. The final section looks at descendants of Holocaust victims and refugees who chose to restore their German citizenship – and why they made that decision. Why had I done it? To get an EU passport after Brexit. To make it easier to work abroad one day. To give my future children the option to live anywhere in Europe. To skip the queues at immigration. All valid reasons. And all, suddenly, entirely inconsequential Staring at the memorial plaques on Platform 17, sitting on the steps of the apartment block on Thomasiusstrasse, losing my footing in the Garden of Exile, I felt myself slot into the narrative, the next chapter of a story that is both unfathomable and at the same time utterly unexceptional. Opa died when I was 12. He was so proud of being British. I never asked him how he would feel about us using the trauma of his past to become German for the sake of convenience. I'd always thought he'd like the idea of us reclaiming his rightful heritage, but in Berlin it seemed less clear. But I do think he would have liked the fact that we were all there in Berlin, on the streets where he and his wife grew up, laughing and crying together, realising our mother-and-daughters getaway had ended up a lot like Eisenberg's A Real Pain after all. The three of us lost in reverie outside the apartment block, picturing my grandmother coming and going. A sign by the door was engraved in looping gothic script. It looked like a memorial plaque. We struggled to decipher first the letters, then the German. Eventually we resorted to Google Translate, and discovered in lieu of the profound message we had expected, a polite request for guests to please wipe their feet. [See also: Rachel Reeves' 'impossible trilemma'] Related
South Wales Guardian
3 hours ago
- South Wales Guardian
US vice president JD Vance to stay with David Lammy as he holidays in Britain
Mr Vance and his family will begin their summer holiday this Friday with a stay at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary's Grade I-listed mansion in Kent, according to the Telegraph newspaper. The pair are said to have developed a warm friendship, bonding over their difficult childhoods and shared Christian faith. Mr Lammy is reported to have attended mass at the vice president's Washington residence during a visit in March, and now plans to repay the favour with the stay at his country home. The two are expected to hold a bilateral meeting before being joined by their families at Chevening. 'Lammy has visited Vance's family and the relationship looks like it will continue to grow on a personal as well as a professional basis,' a source told the Telegraph. The vice president and his family are also expected to visit Hampton Court Palace during their trip to the UK, the mainstay of which will be spent in the Cotswolds. Mr Vance's British holiday comes just weeks after Donald Trump travelled to Scotland, on a private visit his golf courses. There he also met with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen to agree a trade deal with the bloc, and with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Mr Trump will return to the UK for a full state visit in September. The Foreign Secretary's burgeoning relationship with Mr Vance represents a political change of heart, as he was once an outspoken critic of Mr Trump. Mr Lammy described the US president as a 'racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser' when Labour was in opposition, but since coming to power has brushed off his remarks as 'old news'. Asked about Mr Vance's visit to the UK, a Foreign Office spokesman said: 'Ministerial engagements will be announced in the usual way.'
Glasgow Times
4 hours ago
- Glasgow Times
US vice president JD Vance to stay with David Lammy as he holidays in Britain
Mr Vance and his family will begin their summer holiday this Friday with a stay at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary's Grade I-listed mansion in Kent, according to the Telegraph newspaper. The pair are said to have developed a warm friendship, bonding over their difficult childhoods and shared Christian faith. Chevening House (Johnny Green/PA) Mr Lammy is reported to have attended mass at the vice president's Washington residence during a visit in March, and now plans to repay the favour with the stay at his country home. The two are expected to hold a bilateral meeting before being joined by their families at Chevening. 'Lammy has visited Vance's family and the relationship looks like it will continue to grow on a personal as well as a professional basis,' a source told the Telegraph. The vice president and his family are also expected to visit Hampton Court Palace during their trip to the UK, the mainstay of which will be spent in the Cotswolds. Mr Vance's British holiday comes just weeks after Donald Trump travelled to Scotland, on a private visit his golf courses. Donald Trump at one of his courses in Aberdeenshire (Jane Barlow/PA) There he also met with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen to agree a trade deal with the bloc, and with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Mr Trump will return to the UK for a full state visit in September. The Foreign Secretary's burgeoning relationship with Mr Vance represents a political change of heart, as he was once an outspoken critic of Mr Trump. Mr Lammy described the US president as a 'racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser' when Labour was in opposition, but since coming to power has brushed off his remarks as 'old news'. Asked about Mr Vance's visit to the UK, a Foreign Office spokesman said: 'Ministerial engagements will be announced in the usual way.'
