What you're actually booking
Most British B&Bs are small by design — three to eight rooms is typical — which means a level of attention a hotel reception rarely offers: the owner who checks you in is usually the same person serving breakfast the next morning and the one who'll know which bus actually goes where.
The cooked breakfast is the point
It's almost always included in the room rate, and it's worth building a slower morning around rather than treating as a formality: a full English, Scottish or Welsh breakfast varies by region — black pudding and tattie scones are standard north of the border, laverbread turns up on a proper Welsh plate — and a good one easily carries you to a late lunch.
Where they're strongest
Market towns, coastal resorts and national park areas — the Lake District, the Cotswolds, the Peak District — are where B&Bs genuinely outnumber chain hotels, often by a wide margin, simply because there isn't enough passing trade in those places to support a Premier Inn.
What to check before booking
A handful of smaller, older guesthouses still only have shared bathrooms down the hall rather than en-suite, and some still prefer a card payment confirmed by phone over an instant online booking. In popular areas, weekend bookings sometimes carry a two-night minimum in peak season — worth checking before you commit to a one-night stop.
How to find a good one
Booking.com and Airbnb list most working B&Bs, but on a small property a guest-rating filter above roughly 9/10 combined with reviews from the last two or three months is a more reliable signal than the overall score alone — a handful of bad reviews skew the average far more on an eight-room guesthouse than on a 200-room hotel. Sawday's (published as "Alastair Sawday's Special Places to Stay") is a long-running independent guide that specifically curates characterful, owner-run places if you want a shorter, more vetted list rather than everything that happens to be listed. Where one still exists, a local tourist information centre often knows about genuinely good small places that never bother listing online at all.