About

What this is

The Great Britain Guide is a free guide to the United Kingdom with no display advertising and no paywall. The aim is simple: a fast, honest reference for travellers and locals — castles, towns, museums, national parks, beaches and thousands more places worth visiting.

How it's built

Every page is pre-rendered at build time. Place data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, Wikidata and ONS open datasets, fetched once and committed to the repository so the live site never needs to call an external API. Images are downloaded from Wikimedia Commons and resized locally with Sharp.

Pages are served from a Node server behind a CDN, pre-rendered where possible and cached at the edge. We use Google Analytics to see which pages are useful and a lightweight performance monitor to catch slow pages; both set cookies. We do not sell data, and there is no third-party display advertising — a single banner for a sister project helps keep the guide free.

How the words are written

Most descriptions are composed deterministically from structured facts (year founded, area, county, designation), and longer passages are quoted or summarised from Wikipedia and the official heritage registers, with sources listed on every page. Where a summary is AI-assisted it is generated only from those same facts, checked against the source text, and labelled on the page — never invented.

Spotted an error?

Email contact@thegreatbritainguide.com with the place name and what needs correcting. Manual corrections are applied as overlays on top of the open-data sources.