History focused travel guide
 

Most travel guides focus on sights and facilities (ex: Fodor, Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Let's Go, etc), with perhaps a very short historical account. As I plan to ride the length of the UK this summer, I'd like to find a book telling the (hi)story of the places I'll go through. Something to read in the evening. Ideally 5-10 pages about the town/region. (I understand that it is almost impossible to tell the story of London in 5 pages, vs the story of some obscure hamlet, but you get the idea).

Suggestions appreciated.

Blue Guides
https://www.blueguides.com/

By far the best guidebook in the world. Limited geographical coverage. They do have a London book though.

I don't have an offline suggestion of history for the UK places.

The closest I can come organized online is to read the history sections of the Wikipedia pages for places as you find them.

Alternately for an offline, you can find a good recommendation for history of England/Scotland/Wales organized chronologically (or by theme) and use your travels as an excuse to read. I did something similar last summer when visiting Indonesia and picked up an Audible+Kindle book to listen read an extended history of Indonesia. Also a while ago, but I did similar things with Canada and Australia.

Michelin Green Guides tend to focus on that sort of information compared to say LP or the RG. Worth a look.

My impression as well. I'll try to figure a way to automate downloading city/town/regional entries.

Perhaps a job for LLMs :)

[EDIT]
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li...wns_in_England
Would be the starting page. I can write a script to iterate and download links, but perhaps not worth reinventing the wheel. Anyone would have a suggestion?
[/EDIT]

There are probably options to "httrack" which downloads/clones a web site. For example, ask it to start cloning at your list of cities and towns and only go to a certain depth...

Update:

I just tried a basic example:
httrack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o..._United_States --depth=2

It downloaded ~150MB in my case and let me browse the top page and the next linked page offline, e.g.
"file:///en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_territorial_capitols_in_the_United_State"
"file:///home/mev/capitols/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_State_Capitol.html"
I got a total of 454 wikipedia html pages.

Links on that second level page were valid online links but I didn't have them offline. For example, the image files on the second level Alabama State Capitol page were still live links to the existing wikipedia page, "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alabama_Capitol_original_plan.jpg" so I could see them online but not online. I suppose I could spider to a depth of 3 but then end up pulling in a lot more of wikipedia...