Abstract
London has had Gothic tourism for a long time. Indeed, as the example of Madame Tussaud’s shows, some of its oldest purpose-devised tourist attractions are Gothic. In the last half century, the amount of Gothic tourism in London has increased substantially. London’s latest acquisitions include: the Clink in Bankside (which announces itself as the London prison museum); the London Dungeon; the London Bridge Experience; the Ghost Bus Tours (the Necrobus); Dennis Severs’ house in Folgate, Spitalfields; Simon Drake’s House of Magic (‘hidden away at a secret Central London location’)1; as well as numerous ghost tours and Ripper walks. In this chapter, I’m going to be taking a tour of some of London’s contemporary Gothic tourism as a means of exploring contemporary Gothic tourism more generally. I will be starting with an example that is perhaps the most akin to Walpole’s house — Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields — before taking myself to Drury Lane Theatre in the West End, considering its ‘Through the Stage Door’ tour. After this, I will be going south of the river — to the Clink in Bankside, and the London Dungeon. Finally, I will be touring the city (or rather cities — Westminster and the City) on the Necrobus. En route, I will be discussing some of the dominant tropes and modes of the attractions.
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Notes
Raphael Samuel (1994), Theatres of Memory vol. I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1996), page 114.
Dennis Severs, 18 Folgate Street: The Tale of a House in Spitalfields (London: Chatto and Windus and Vintage 2002), page 155.
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), page 4.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), page 150. For Stewart, the ‘chief subject [of the imaginary context of origin] is a projection of the possessor’s childhood’ (page 150).
Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), page 12.
Patrick Wright, A Journey Through Ruins: a Keyhole Portrait of British Postwar Life and Culture (London: Flamingo, 1993), page 139.
David I. Cunningham, ‘Living in the Slashing Grounds: Jack the Ripper, Monopoly Rent and the New Heritage’, in Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis (eds.) Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pages 159–175, page 173.
See Robert Mighall’s, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), passim.
E J Burford, A Short History of The Clink Prison (no publisher or place of Publication, 1989), unnumbered page.
E J Burford, A Short History of The Clink Prison (no publisher or place of publication, 1989), page 12.
Nicole Reynolds, Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), page 116.
Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry (Bath: Windsor/Paragon, 2010).
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© 2016 Emma McEvoy
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McEvoy, E. (2016). London’s Gothic Tourism: West End Ghosts, Southwark Horrors and an Unheimlich Home. In: Gothic Tourism. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391292_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137391292_4
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