Watling Street: Travels Through Britain and Its Ever-Present Past [1] is the fifth book by the British journalist, novelist and cultural historian John Higgs.

Along this route Boudicca met her end, the battle of Bosworth changed royal history, Bletchley Park code breakers cracked Nazi transmissions and Capability Brown remodelled the English landscape.

Described as 'A journey along one of Britain's oldest roads, from Dover to Anglesey, in search of the hidden history that makes us who we are today,' Higgs traces the footsteps of ancient travellers along the full 276-mile length of Watling Street from beginning to end.

[Higgs's] is a systematising imagination, able to harness disparate elements and find the patterns that animate them; that he does so in a more socially inclusive manner than many enriches his theories enormously";[3] and Ian Samson of Times Literary Supplement called it "A new vision of England .

The journey opens near St Margaret’s Bay, where Ian Fleming lived in a cottage he bought in the early 1950s from Noël Coward, and ends in the wilds of Anglesey.