Touring bikes?

Good tourers are expensive. £1000 doesn't get you much, but the best £1k tourer at the moment has got to be the Condor Heritage. Available in a range of specs but £1k is do-able. It has a great steel frame, all the stability and fittings you need, and was said to be "quite racy for a tourer" in the C-plus review that gave it 9/10. (And its my next bike purchase ).

I have an Audax bike, good for light touring, but when fully loaded the back end sways like mad. That's why I am after a fully-fledged tourer for my next purchase.

Condor take Halfords vouchers, btw

Are you carrying camping stuff or travelling light? If the former then a proper tourer would be my choice (unfortunately as soon as you tag a bike with tourer the price gets artificially inflated), but if the latter then a comfortable road bike would be my choice (e.g. my Kuota Kharma that cost a little over a grand that took me unsupported from LE to JOG this year). Audax bikes also make good llight tourers, but again once the Audax tag is added the price gets inflated.

I think you should go for a proper tourer in that case. My g/f does tour happily on a Trek 1.2 with rear panniers, the bike is very good at this, but I take all the camping gear so she is travelling light. My bike (the Audax bike) handles like a pig (rear triangle swings all over the place) when fully loaded. I have tried touring on my Ti mtb, this is more stable at the back, but the steering is twitchy as hell even though I changed the forks to rigid steel ones, so neither really does the job well, hence my purchase of a proper tourer (on Cyclescheme - my voucher for £1k at Condor has been issued, but is stuck somewhere in the postal system). So my advice is to get a bike built for the job rather than a compromise, as you don't know how ambitious your tours will get, and you may end up having to buy the dedicated tourer sometime in the future. A good tourer will last you years.

There used to be more choices under £1k, but the standard tourer of choice, the Dawes Galaxy has now gone up in price a lot. Only the regular Galaxy with bar end shifters and the cheaper steel frame is under £1k now, I would want the Super Galaxy but that is likely to cost upwards of £1100, and has a list price of £1500 (which you may have to pay as you are ordering via Halfords). Another Dawes option might be the Horizon, cheaper, sturdy, but nothing lightweight about it.

There are also good tourers from Ridgeback (the Panorama, around £1k), Hewitt Cheviot (as mentioned above), and Byercycles (uses the same frame as Hewitt). None of these are as good as the Condor Heritage IMHO, and your problem with all of these will be buying with your Halfords voucher - may be possible, but don't assume so.

It may have been me who mentioned the Hewitt, I have had it over three years and I am very happy with it, before that I had a 531 framed Galaxy for about ten years. Good piece of kit available for under a grand.