Interview: Alistair Sawday

Accommodation: a low, modern L-shaped building with blue-framed windows and doors. A pretty lawn in front with a pond (note: the owner has admitted to a fondness for skinny-dipping, but not necessarily here). Facilities: large kitchen with good-sized wooden table for guests. Internet access. Close to the amenities of Bristol. Atmosphere: friendly, hard-working.

The genial proprietor of this welcoming place isn t, however, the owner of a B&B, but Alastair Sawday of the eponymous travel-book empire, which seeks to send people off to Special Places to Stay , as well as teaching them, in other books, how to live Greenly and slowly as they go. Alastair, it s clear, is a man with a mission. My wife says I m hopelessly busy, he admits, but it all means something to me.

Alastair s life changed when, desperate to avoid becoming a lawyer after reading law at university, he went on a VSO in St Lucia, West Indies, which opened my eyes up to another world . It was there that he met his wife, Em, to whom he s still married, and they have two boys. After working back home as a teacher, he started up a travel company. We largely sent people off on cycling and walking holidays around Europe, but I also did one or two other things, including taking a party on a walk in Ladakh, by the Himalayas. It s an immensely civilised country, in many ways more so than ours. They seem to have solved all their problems and are an example of how a society can live in harmony with its environment.

Running the travel company meant that he accumulated a vast amount of extraordinary places to see and published privately the first guide of Special Places to Stay in France in 1994. What was intended to be a one-off venture soon grew. We were the first people to say Be independent, don t do what the tour operators tell you to do . Also, we were clear that what we were after was good conversation and organic food nothing pretentious. People trusted us straight away, but I think the moment for it happened to be absolutely right.

Tall and groomed with a confident air, Alastair doesn t just talk Green, he walks it, too. He s stood as a candidate for the Green Party, founded Avon Friends of the Earth and has been vice chair of the Soil Association: I m sad I no longer have time for them, as I loved the people I ve worked with lots of morganisations, and I ve never been as impressed as I was with them. Despite the demands of his business, he s still committed to eco issues. We re killing the planet, and it s just stupid. I helped to launch the campaign to make Bristol a plastic-bag-free city, and I m also trying to turn the street on which I live into a slow road . We re zig-zagging the traffic and planting more flowers and trees. I want neighbours to say hello more. I really feel it quite deeply if people don t say hello to me.

Alastair s offices have a mass of eco awards because I mouth off a lot about environmental issues and I had to put my money where my mouth is . I particularly liked the vast rainwater tank buried beneath a hump in the lawn. All of which makes Alastair sound rather convivial. In fact, that s his favourite word he defines it as to have exchanges which are nourishing, leading to people doing more and more things together .

However, on the matter of bad taste, he s a very cross man indeed. I m powerfully hostile to the cloning of the high street, anything that smacks of mass tourism or vulgarisation. I like eccentrics on the whole. Bog-standard stuff is just awful. I have a memory of staying somewhere terribly pretentious with rows of bookshelves of unread books, glass coffee tables and twee signs telling you what to do. I couldn t wait to get out of there. Alastair s guides aren t interested in fashion: We re supposed to be the antithesis of Hip Hotels. In fact, although you might think Alastair would be a terrifying guest, he says that he seeks a little imperfection in return for something more interesting: I want to bring expectations down a bit. Which makes for some rather special places to stay.

Go Slow England is out now, £12.99, from www.sawdays.co.uk