10 reasons to visit England

London boasts some of the best museums in the world, famous sights and an exciting nightlife with plenty of live music. It's an attractive mixture. The English capital is one of the most-visited cities in Europe and attracts millions of tourists every year.

You can plunge into the history of England by visiting one of its countless castles and palaces. Many of these venerable edifices are well maintained and preserved - for instance, Dover Castle, a medieval fortress high above the white cliffs of Dover.

Tea, especially black tea with milk, is still a quintessentially English beverage. The country's tea culture first emerged in the mid-17th century. A cream tea, traditionally a specialty of Cornwall and Devon, is a light afternoon meal with tea and scones, best eaten warm with clotted cream and jam.

England is also known for modern architecture by such renowned names as Norman Foster and David Chipperfield. In London, you can visit the Aquatics Centre designed by Zaha Hadid for the 2012 Olympics, and also go swimming there.

These standing stones are the best-known prehistoric monument in England and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Whether they served as a temple, observatory or burial site is unclear to this day. The stones in the inner circle were erected in around 2,500 BC.

The former industrial city of Manchester has become a modern metropolis with hip bars and clubs. World renowned musicians, artists and actors appear at the Manchester International Festival every two years.

In addition to innumerable large-scale landscape gardens, England boasts many small flower gardens open to the public. A famous example of British landscape design can be found in the gardens at the Stourhead estate in the county of Wiltshire in south-west England, which were opened in 1740 as an artistic synthesis of meadows, lakes, woodlands, vantage points and vistas.

All Beatles fans come to Liverpool if they can. The fab four's childhood homes are still standing in the suburbs (and in Ringo Starr's case, the inner city). You'll also find the real Penny Lane, the Beatles Story museum, and the Cavern Club, where the Beatles made several hundred appearances.

England's southwesternmost county has an astonishingly mild climate, but what really makes Cornwell special is its natural beauty: rough, steep rocky coasts, small fishing villages and long sandy beaches. The rugged coasts of Cornwall are also riddled with the settings of famous English novels such as 'Rebecca' by Daphne du Maurier.

You get especially close to the playwright William Shakespeare in the the county of Warwickshire. In Stratford-upon-Avon you can visit the house where he was born and his schoolroom. His world-famous plays are produced regularly all over England, including in Shakespeare's Globe, a reconstruction of the Elizabethan Globe Theatre in London.