Tourism, Regional Economies and Cultural Workers

Abstract

As we saw earlier in the book, in the Victorian era the early adopters of what was to become nature tourism needed to be taught how to look at the landscape as the sublime picturesque and not as a source of unknown terror (see also Urry, 2002 and Williams, 1973). With Britons forced to discover the delights of nature at home and not as part of a European ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe as a result of revolution within France and subsequent conflict between it and Britain, new English tourist regions were developed. To this end travel guides were released and the ‘tourist gaze’ cultivated (Urry, 2002, 1995); travel requisites became available (such as the Claude glass), and viewing stations were built to frame the view to best advantage (see Figure 1.1). Scroll forward more than two centuries and, again, cultural workers are playing a leading role in providing an enabling framework for the tourist’s appreciation of nature. But while in Wordsworth’s time the effects of massive tourism expansion on the very qualities of place they sought to share were only beginning to be known, today in popular sites, infrastructure and environmental pressures are being felt acutely and are a major policy and planning focus. Meanwhile less popular areas, those without the natural features and associated cultural histories of a Lake District National Park, Cotswolds village or New World wine region, find themselves keen to attract new visitors in order to change their own narrative of place — in the perceptions both of visitors but correspondingly, and more importantly, also of locals.