Suggestions for Itinerary - London to Cornwall/Lake District/Liverpool

The Lake District fits more naturally with Liverpool than Cornwall.

In the Lake District we have a pretty good bus service, which will still be on summer timetables until the end of October.

The buses will get you to anywhere a tourist might want to get to.

There are also a few direct trains a day from Penrith or Oxenholme to Liverpool (with apparently more to start in June) and an hourly alternative with a simple change at Preston.

By train you can now leave London at 5.30pm and be in Keswick or Windermere by 10pm.

I will be straight up with you that by the end of October the nights up here are really starting to close in. And you totally need to be prepared for the weather to be turning autumnal. By the last week in October we seem to be getting into a weather pattern now when that last week in the month is pretty stormy. You could get lucky and get a really nice week, but I'm not going to sugar coat the reality of what could happen. There is no point in me selling you a false story.

If the weather does turn bad there are indoor attractions, especially on the West coast of Cumbria, at Barrow in the South and Carlisle and Penrith on the edges.

If you did Cornwall first then Loganair flies from Newquay to Manchester (easyjet also do but only May to September). National Express run regular buses from London to many Cornish destinations including overnight buses. Clearly the train is faster and more frequent.

I reasonably regularly travel from the Lake District to Cornwall; I always rely on the Cornish bus network (supplemented by coastal and river ferries, and trains) when there and am pretty familiar with it. I don't have problems with the network, and it gets me pretty much everywhere.
However the general consensus on this forum is that you need a car in Cornwall, so I am very clearly doing something unwittingly wrong with my travels down there.
Because I am over 60 I always go to Cornwall by National Express bus as I get a £15 fare each way from the Lake District, 3 days a week. I accept that it is a fairly lengthy journey by bus, but there is a sort of trade off there of price vs efficiency.

As a tourist that price trade off is much less important to you.

AFAIK United have no flights to MAN which are useful to you in CO unless they are a code share with another airline

I would order this as London, Lakes, Liverpool, Cornwall and then back to London.

HOWEVER, a lot depends on what you mean by 10-14 days.... If it is 10 days then trying to do all four is ambitious, especially as you need to allow time to travel between the different places. The Lake District and Cornwall are at opposite ends of the country. Don’t underestimate time to travel between destinations - Britain may not look large compared with the States, but distances will take a lot longer to cover than you might expect. You are looking at 2-3 days to get between places (and don’t forget to allow a day to recover from jet lag....) Being realistic, you need to drop Cornwall from the itinerary as it is the ‘outlier’.

If you have 14 days then it is more achievable as that would allow 3-4 night for each place.

I would leave off Cornwall, as public transport is not great and driving can be a bit harrowing, with all the single track roads bordered by high hedges and stone walls. I found driving there very stressful and I've driven before in the UK, including 3 weeks in Scotland last year.

So if it were me, I would do London, Lakes, Liverpool and then either head to Manchester or back to London to fly home. As wasleys said, with 10-14 days, that would give you 3-4 days in each location, which is a good amount of time.

However the general consensus on this forum is that you need a car in Cornwall, so I am very clearly doing something unwittingly wrong with my travels down there.

Stuart, you're not doing anything wrong, but you know the bus system like the back of your hand. Most people don't, especially a first time traveler to the UK. It can be arduous to figure out which bus or train to take and when and where. It's time consuming just to plan it, and then it's time consuming to travel by public transportation. I'm not knocking public transport—I used it extensively in Germany, but it's easy as pie there. It's not in Cornwall.

Agree with other posters Cornwall being a Peninsula will be problematic. Head North and get twice as much for your money. You can add in Liverpool, Chester a beautiful roman City, ( I live there) and even Manchester for music nighlife and swagger. Transport is so much easier.