Avoid the tourist hotspots of the Lake District and you’ll discover a more authentic side to the area with artists, microbreweries and community pubs

You’d be forgiven, as a visitor to the Lake District, for imagining that the governing attractions are daffodils, Grasmere gingerbread, Herdy (the bleating fell-side variety and the brand), mountain watercolours and lake steamers. So fixed have these associations become with the region that it’s now the victim of its own twee, commercial image.

Millions of tourists tromp the same routes each year, seeking out waterside and lookout points, and bagging famous peaks. Queues at Sarah Nelson’s Grasmere Gingerbread stretch round the cottage bakery and past Wordsworth’s grave. Wainwright’s ridges become polished with footfall; the roads into the national park jam with holiday traffic. There’s even speculation that the now horribly polluted Windermere will be shut this summer.

With its oyster bar, rooftop terrace and Turner-worthy sunset views, this breezy, elegant boutique hotel is a welcome new addition to the town’s seafront

When I first started visiting Margate, about 20 years ago, there were only two real options when it came to choosing a hotel: the Walpole Bay, an eccentric Edwardian time capsule in Cliftonville, with floral carpets, an original 1927 trellis gated lift and a collection of unsettling “antiques” in the corridors (dolls’ heads, vintage typewriters, prams); or the Premier Inn, which had none of those things but was handy for the station.

The first inkling that the long-hyped regeneration of Margate was more than just wishful thinking was when the Reading Rooms opened on Hawley Square in 2009 – two years before the arrival of the Turner Contemporary put the neglected seaside town back on the map. The motto of this boutique B&B with just three decadently beautiful bedrooms might as well have been “If you build it [they] will come.” The gamble paid off. They did come. And the trailblazing B&B has since been joined by a flurry of new guesthouses and hotels, from the stylish Fort Road hotel to the arty Margate House in Cliftonville.

Alongside rare birds, reptiles and insects, this corner of Dorset, poignantly depicted in Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May, serves up brilliant heathland walks, sea views and pints of local ale

Mike Leigh’s brilliant 1976 Dorset-based comedy Nuts in May begins with Keith and Candice-Marie taking the chain ferry from Sandbanks across the mouth of Poole harbour to the Isle of Purbeck, where they camp, visit Corfe Castle, walk along the mighty Jurassic coastline and end up in an altercation with a young Brummie couple called Finger and Honky. For me, watching Nuts in May is an annual tradition, as is visiting the peninsula where it was filmed. Most of us have places for which we feel a particularly strong pull; one of mine is Purbeck. And since this peninsula’s recent status as England’s first “super” nature reserve, I’m beginning to understand why.

Being a relatively remote peninsula, Purbeck has seen little major development over the past 70 years, despite its south coast location. On a human scale, the landscape is relatively unchanged since Keith and Candice-Marie’s ill-fated camping trip half a century ago. Behind the scenes, however, years of conservation work from seven organisations – including the National Trust, RSPB, Dorset Wildlife Trust and Natural England – has led to the creation of a near-continuous jigsaw of restored habitats, making it the UK’s first designated super nature reserve, running clockwise from Brownsea Island and the Studland peninsula to Arne, further west on Poole harbour.

Which? readers have consigned the Lincolnshire town to the bottom of the list of beach resorts – despite its affordability, unspoilt coastline and clean water

Name: Skegness.

Age: Inhabited since the iron age.

TV presenter and naturalist Steve Backshall finds a camper truck the ideal way to give children an outdoors experience in untamed parts of northern England

Camping trips with a young family can be thoroughly challenging, especially in the UK, when the weather often skips from sunshine to deluge in the blink of an eye. My extra challenge is that my wife, Helen, can’t join us for our Easter break (she’s away training for her fourth Olympic Games – reasonable excuse). My three kids (twins of four, and an older brother not quite six) are a tornado handful at the best of times. I definitely don’t want to be flying abroad with them, but I want to give them a memorable wild outdoors experience. So what to do?

Inspiration comes in the form of Wild Camper Trucks, a small enterprise set up by entrepreneur Andrew Clark, who rents out a fleet of four-wheel-drive campers from bases in Kendal and Inverness. The vans are go-anywhere robust and reliable, but kitted out with enough home comforts that they feel like glamping on the go. Thanks to the additional roof tent, they’re set up to sleep four, but with kids as young as ours we could definitely push it to five. There’s a bijou kitchen and eating area, plenty of lounging and kipping space, and a huge amount of storage, which allows us to take all the outdoor toys we want.

Andrew has teamed up with websites Off Grid Camp and Nearly Wild Camping, which connect 4x4, campervan and canvas wild campers with landowners. Campers subscribe to the websites, and pay their hosts as they would at any campsite.