Idealog - August 2006

These postings appeared originally on www.westwood232.blogspot.com.

Tourism Needs Transport - Viewing

31.08.06

Unlike the Great Orme cable cars in the previous posting, chair lifts carry fewer people but generally give more spectacular views. Most of them are associated in people's minds with ski resorts but there are plenty in other places where they are used to give some sort of exciting views for visitors. In the photo the chair lift is taking people across the San Diego Zoo in Southern California. It means they can get from one half to the other pretty quickly, but it's a bit like flying in a hot air balloon over an African Wildlife Park. Well, I did say a bit.

Sometimes this kind of system is called an aerial ropeway, a gondola tramway or an aerial lift. Technically the terms are more precise, but common usage seems to favour chair lift. Much is made of the system introduced by the Union Pacific Railway chairman, W Averill Harrimann, for the company's new Sun Valley resort in Idaho. These were open chairs which 'scooped' up skiers, still wearing their skis, to carry them up the mountain side. However, the 'world first' claim attached to them depends on a narrow definition of them as simple chairs hung from cables, rather than platforms or gondolas.

There are references to simple devices carrying a wooden platform suspended from ropes to haul military supplies into castles across moats or walls in the 15th century. Navies around the world during the Napoleonic Wars employed Bosun's Chairs to carry a person from one ship at sea across to another, suspended from cables. Early Japanese inventions included land-based systems for carrying people. In 1908 a goods-lifting cable car at Bozen in the South Tyrol was allowed to carry some passengers. In the Verkehrshaus, the Swiss Transport Museum in Lucerne, can be seen a replica of a platform system used to carry farm produce, animals or people using a cable arrangement from high to low pastures and farms in the 1920s. The museum guide book gives a detailed history.

Of special note is the system designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the New York World's Fair in 1939. It was a 'conveyor belt' of side-facing chairs, each for one visitor, moving them around his Futurama display for General Motors of what the metropolis of the future would be like. This had other antecedents on industrial fairground and international exhibition systems of switchback railways and high, moving viewing platforms or 'bridges'.

Whatever their complicated history, and what the public relations people say, chair lifts are fun, practical and great ways to view tourist destinations - another form of leisure transport.
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Tourism Needs Transport - Attraction

30.08.06

For over a hundred years a specialised form of transport has carried people from the North Wales resort of Llandudno up the Great Orme. This is a 210-metre high mini-mountain jutting out from close to the western end of the town into the Irish Sea. Llandudno is one of the prominent seaside resorts along this coast and has been popular since Victorian times, especially when good weather allows for impressive views from the top.

In April 1901 work began to build the first section and it was opened 15 months later. A second section carried its first passengers the following year. The system is made up of an upper and a lower cable-car route, travellers changing over half way. Both of the sections operate with cars attached to a continuous cable which is started and stopped using radio communication between the drivers and the engine operator. Each section has two cars, one descending and one ascending, their weights helping to balance the load on the winding drum. There has only ever been one serious accident, in 1932, when two people were killed as a drawbar on one car broke away and released the car from its restraining cable. The system was redesigned and later sold to a new operator, but it struggled to be successful during the war years and in 1948 it was acquired by Llandudno Council. In 1990 radio communication was installed to operate the system. Before that a telephone in each car was connected using a pole to keep wire contact with an overhead cable, which made the cars appear to many people to be electrically-driven using their own engines. Each car carries 60 passengers and at the present time some 160,000 people ride the Great Orme Tramway every year.

The photo shows car 7 operating on the upper section.
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Tourism Needs Transport - Showcase

29.08.06

The kind of tourism that uses no form of transport at all is negligible. Only by walking the whole time can a traveller avoid using transport - and that includes admiring passing vehicles, boats and planes.

Sometimes transport forms the attraction. The excitement of flying, the nostalgia of steam locomotives or the spectacular beauty of tall ships all contribute to the delights of certain kinds of travelling. This example is in the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. It's an example of a museum artifact as precious art, mounted above a mirror to emphasise its qualities and brightly lit to highlight its form.

The wood-burning loco that made its smokey way across the American landscape would never had appeared this well-painted and clean. The museum curators want to present it as a high engineering achievement, handsome, efficient and powerful. The engineer who drove it might have thought otherwise as he worked in the dirty environment of the footplate. The American natives who saw it pass by their land might have feared for the future and resented what it brought. Yet the locomotive driver could also have been proud of his charge and kept it as clean as he was able; the natives may have welcomed the new opportunities it brought. Other museum exhibits and other museums show the dirt and the danger. This one shows the beauty.
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Dark Tourism - A Text

28.08.06

Lennon and Foley's book was published in 2000. Reprinted twice, current copies are still in the original edition and therefore do not include anything on the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The book is based around a set of seven case studies, a number of other examples, and opening and closing chapters discussing the topic. War is the overwhelming focus of the studies, with the assassination of President Kennedy and the political division of Cyprus next. The approach is largely based on observation during field visits, with strong use of background material drawing on history and quotations from people involved in the management and development of sites. There are many illustrations using photos largely taken by the authors.

As the first book dedicated to a broad study of 'dark tourism', it is a starting point for much that needs debating around the subject, and follows a number of papers and articles that the authors have written on particular aspects of the subject. Where it is less satisfactory is in the perspectives. A previous posting on this blog about Arlington National Cemetery commented on the narrow judgment that they gave to the JFK grave site. The studies that are included cover a wide field but tend to be briefly descriptive according to a rather narrow viewpoint. Academic studies - they review many - have a tendency to see the places that people visit as the outcome of relatively simple processes. I have a particular dislike of those which sum them up under the label "post-modernism", which seems to me to be an academic cop-out, an attempt to produce a quick explanation which is really too shallow for comfort. They say "Our argument is that 'dark tourism' is an intimation of post-modernity" (p11).

I'm reminded of the ten minute rule exercised by many British primary medical practitioners which inevitably produces only a partial diagnosis, often based on very few, surface, observations. Better is a holistic approach in which more depth and greater breadth would lead to a real understanding of the individual. The places that people visit are formed and operated by a complex history of interacting motives and events. It is misleading to see the resulting outcomes, which appear to share certain characteristics, as automatically stemming from the same motivations. The book uses the term 'tourism products' as if all these sites are merely attempts to make money by western-style businesses, and yet the discussions and examples in the book (a political slogan in Northern Cyprus, the US Holocaust Museum) clearly point elsewhere. Again, similarities between sites of interpretation and income generation are the results of practical requirements, but do not mean that the motivations and the messages are all the same, nor the resulting visitor experience. The visitor leaving the London Dungeon might go out and buy the latest horror movie; the visitor departing the National Underground Railway Center might want to go out and hug the nearest black person.

Lennon, J and Foley, M (2000) Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, London, Thomson Learning
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Dark Tourism - Shading and Proportion

26.08.06

A tourist itinerary might last several days (the excursion, that is, a day visit, might have different destinations or might not). Assuming an itinerary of a week, it is likely that there will be a number of places visited and different activities undertaken. This means that if one or more are of some kind of Dark Tourism character, there will be variations in the proportion of time spent immersed within it.

A family travelling around the north of England for a week might come across the Sledmere Monument discussed in a previous posting and touch upon a brief aspect of Dark Tourism - the story of the farm worker going to Flanders to revenge the death of Belgian women at the hands of German soldiers. Only a short period of just one day will be taken up by it. If, however, they were researching their family history there might be a higher proportion of the week spent studying gravestones and monuments and church records. The proportion of the holiday will be higher. For an individual or couple, as opposed to a family, it might be quite a high proportion. On the other hand the intensity of 'darkness' is less - reading grave inscriptions is much lighter than visiting a concentration camp such as Auschwitz or Sachsenhausen. Time spent in Washington DC amongst the monuments spaced at intervals along the Mall, visiting the Ford Theatre where President Lincoln was shot or President Kennedy's memorial at Arlington means a greater exposure to death and atrocity, but there will still be the National Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian Museums to lighten the tone.

It does suggest that there are two scales of intensity within Dark Tourism. This has probably been becoming obvious in previous postings on this blog. One is the level of darkness and the other the proportion of any given holiday spent encountering the dark subject. So it is possible to construct a matrix based upon two scales - level of darkness, proportion of time - and to plot upon it different forms of tourist activity. The proportion of time is objectively measurable. 'Level of darkness' is entirely subjective: each and every visitor will decide it - a close family member buried in a grave being visited might represent more heartache to the visitor than a concentration camp seen by a tourist who has come from a distant land with little awareness of its history. Dark Tourism depends not only on the subject, but upon the mind of the tourist.
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Dark Tourism - Mill

25.08.06

A gaunt old mill, built in Victorian times as part of a carpet-making complex in Halifax, England. We know the phrase from William Blake's poem: "dark, satanic mills". Those who worked there used to start at 6:00am, breakfasted two hours later, worked on through a long day. Holidays were brief before an Act of Parliament forced them on mill owners. The mills were noisy, dirty, echoing with deafening noise from dangerous machinery.

All of which is one way of looking at their history, and for those of us who have known working in such places, all those features were present in those days. Dark, satanic ... dark tourism?

When there were arguments about opening an industrial museum in Halifax in the 1980s people expressed versions of two viewpoints. Some wanted no museum and for mills to be demolished. They said they were awful places which had blighted lives and should be removed. Others felt a museum was needed to remind people of the life that had been led. For them, some mills should be kept in the landscape as part of a heritage which recalled both achievements and misery - landscape as museum. Tourism has been promoted successfully in the Halifax area and visitors do see both the dark side and the light.

The photo doesn't tell all the story. The buildings shown are part of the remarkable Dean Clough Business Park created out of the former John Crossley and Sons carpet factory, once Europe's biggest. A string of buildings here are used by service industries both big and small, including some restaurants - and a Travelodge motel, shown below.

The tourist gazing on these old buildings might see the modern business park but know of its origin in some gradgrind mill to which workers were tied by economics. They might, however, think of Victorian enterprise in a town which was bursting with growth and human activity at every level. Do they see dark, or do they see light? Is industrial-heritage tourism a form of dark tourism? In reality, visitors will see all kinds of shades between the extremes according to their own experiences and viewpoints. Dark tourism might only be in the eyes of the beholder.
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Dark Tourism - Sledmere

24.08.06

Deep in the North Yorkshire Wolds, at Sledmere, is a village memorial. The heavy, carved column is supported by four others, making the whole an imposing and eyecatching feature.

Carved around the main column are scenes from life in the area during World War I. Farm workers are shown gathering the harvest into horse-drawn carts. Neat stooks and bales of wheat are collected. The rural life is interrupted by the war. Labourers leave home, bidding farewell to their families and carrying some food in bags slung from a stout sticks. They walk to the city of York where they enlist, and are soon crossing the Channel to France. Before long they are able to fight the German enemy who has been committing atrocities, burning churches and killing women.

For many men these were their first journeys abroad, and coincidentally many who survived found that they had been introduced to the very idea of travelling in Europe. An earlier posting on this site told of a similar soldier of World War II who became a tourist to revisit the places where he had fought. The Sledmere column was erected to remind generations of villagers what their forebears had done in responding to the call to war. Tourists also read the same message.

The Sledmere column could be counted as a mass medium in stone. The opinions of the people who designed it drive a narrative using their interpretation of history. As in the newspapers, books, songs and films of the time there was a strong element of propaganda. All history contains some degree of propaganda. As someone has said, history is written by the victorious and the powerful. The story on the column is very simple: carved reliefs like this have to be. But the reasons for war, its bloody events and the cultures that were involved, are bound to be grossly over-simplified. Here, the British Tommy was good and the German Fritz was bad - bad because they raped and pillaged and slaughtered: we were all honest and decent, they were all vicious and sinful.

Sledmere's column remains, part of village life for most of a century. It tells a story for both villagers and visitors in which much is true, but it distorts some greater truths by missing out much more that should be said. For example: a concern of today is to obtain pardons for British soldiers shot for 'cowardice' after suffering prolonged bombardment during the First World War. Over three hundred men died at the hands of other British soldiers because their commanders wanted to ensure other soldiers continued fighting. The Germans shot very few for cowardice. In another example: when, in 1914, on Christmas Day, some British and German soldiers took a rest from the fighting and met in no man's land to play football, many of them could see that they were the same kind of men in both armies, and that fighting each other was wrong and a ghastly waste of human life.

The many truths about war are told to the tourist in guide books, exhibitions, tourist trails and information panels. Understanding other people and their viewpoints is fundamental to international coexistence. Unless the methods of communication between host and guest are good, dark tourism will be what results from the lack of enlightenment.
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Dark Tourism - Skeleton

23.08.06

This skeleton is in the Jorvik Museum in York in England. As such it is to do with death, one of the prime subjects of Dark Tourism. Is it a morbid exhibit? Is viewing it an indication of some kind of dark interest in death?

The skeleton is not representative of the Jorvik displays which are broadly to do with life, as it was lived by the Viking invaders and settlers in the York area. So visitors might not be expecting, or looking for, this kind of artifact. Can we therefore say that they are engaging in Dark Tourism?

Had they visited the York Dungeon we would certainly say they were showing a particular interest in this kind of tourism. There are displays of torture, murder and various forms of gruesome death - and little else. But the Jorvik skeleton is that of a dead person who met their end by lethal agency. Diseases, battles or executions were common causes of death, all events on the dark side. Here, though, the reason for the skeleton being on show is to illustrate aspects of research into York's Viking past. The viewer has chanced upon it as one of a sequence of displays which are not to do with death.

There is something about the motivation of the viewer which helps define whether the thing visited is to do with dark tourism or not. There is also something about the reason for the subject being dealt with as part of a visitor experience. In Jorvik the skeleton is not primarily an example of death or how that end was met, but an example of a set of remains to be investigated in order to ascertain more about the Vikings.

However .... if what we learn is that these people lived shorter lives which could be ended by being killed in battle, or as punishment for a crime, or for having unpopular beliefs .... then aren't we going to give a slight shudder as we think "what an awful life. Thank goodness we don't live in those conditions". Hasn't a shadow, a brief moment of darkness, passed us by? So there can be a dark component found within a perfectly ordinary experience in a museum ... along with the rats seen in the Viking village reconstruction or the smells of dirt and decay? Doesn't the darkness define the light?
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Dark Tourism - Diana and Dodi

22.08.06

Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed were killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997. The site of the crash in a tunnel by the Pont d'Alma would qualify as a dark tourism 'attraction'. What about this 'shrine' set up in Harrods in Knightsbridge by Dodi al-Fayed's father, who owns the store? It has their pictures, a memento or two, candles and greenery, is roped off from the public but available to them, and has a small plaque explaining its significance in the eyes of the al-Fayed family. Is it really a dark tourism experience, or a chance encounter while doing the shopping? That probably depends on who the public are.

If the people seen here were trailing around a series of places associated with Princess Diana then it could be described as dark tourism. On the other hand, they might have been admirers of her charitable work and influence on the royal establishment and upon, for example, people suffering from AIDS. Is that dark or light? If they were tourists popping in to view the famous food hall and its magnificent displays, and had come across it by chance, then its just a minor encounter.

Perhaps dark tourism exists only in the mind of the beholder. And the intellectual one, at that.
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Dark Tourism - Arlington

21.08.06

The grave of President John F Kennedy is frequently cited in discussions about Dark Tourism. His assassination on 22 November 1963 was a defining moment in American history just like 9/11. Unfortunately many of those debates leave a false impression of the spot. Lennon and Foley, in their book about Dark Tourism call it "a further commodified attraction which has been commercially developed". Their point might be valid when they go on to describe are minibus tours which stop off at the site with "8 minutes for photographs and visits" but not for other aspects of the place . They thought this "the least reverential of all the Kennedy sites examined".

Arlington National Cemetery covers 612 acres and contains the remains of over a quarter of a million people. Memorials range from large monuments to small plaques. Thousands of visitors call each day to see the Cemetery and doubtless in some way large or small to pay their respects. Many arrive at a special station on the metro system and then walk through a visitor centre (where there are goods and souvenirs on sale, including patriotic and nationalistic DVDs) and along the paths up the hill to the main sites, which are diverse. There is no admission fee. The souvenirs are a matter of taste, and for many visitors will be quite valid as memorials themselves.

Arlington is a place of sweeping lawns with a mix of monuments and rows and rows of gravestones which leave a strong sense of the human side of war and service. On my visit in August 2005 at the height of the holiday season the Kennedy site had many people, all of whom were observing the quiet and respect such a place needs. The design of the marker stones is very simple compared with those of many world leaders around the globe. Around the site are carved quotations from Kennedy speeches recalling his best contributions to human thought. A small bus did arrive, some people - many elderly who would have had difficulty walking here - got off. Some stayed for the next bus 30 minutes later. Nothing about Arlington except the small shop gave any feeling whatsoever of 'commodification'.


It would be easier to identify 'militarisation' and of course 'patriotism'. After all, this is the capital of a nation. Many visitors go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier standing on a slope from which the city can be glimpsed beyond the Potomac. At regular intervals the single Honour Guard is changed. A Sergeant addresses the crowd, requests people to stand, then inspects the new infantryman who will replace the old. To me, this little ceremony was a bit too mechanical. The stylised movements of the rifle inspection were too showy and ritualised and the whole stage show, small as it was as it was with three soldiers, no band or horses, took the attention away from the tomb. The Guardsman who was left on duty made a slow march up and down in front of the tomb every now and then, leaving the impression that the crowd was there to see him. Westminster Abbey, overrun with a mass of visitors, at least keeps its own Tomb of the Unknown Soldier respectfully on view within a frame of red poppies.

Arlington, however, is neither overrun nor a theme park to the dead.
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Dark Tourism - War

20.08.06

Following the previous posting the idea of Dark Tourism comes to mind. Some academic books have appeared and there is at least one web site devoted to the concept. Most tourism is supposedly based on sunshine and, indeed, the lighter side of life. Dark Tourism is said to refer to another variety which involves visiting places to do with death and disaster. Washington DC could be said to enshrine - literally - the negatives of American national life - wartime memorials abound (pictured is part of the Korean War Memorial) along with statues of, for example, Abraham Lincoln (assassinated), out of work men during the 1930s depression (hungry) and graves such as that of John F Kennedy (assassinated).

Most of the entries on the University of Central Lancashire-run web site deal with places like Ground Zero and Auschwitz-Birkenau, which are clearly related to mass murder, the dark side of human behaviour. Some undergraduate students have written dissertations based on researching the topic - I supervised one myself this last year. The fact that some people will look upon others who visit such places as being odd or even morbid does suggest the usefulness of a phrase such as Dark Tourism: it is markedly different and therefore worthy of examination and understanding. On the other hand, is it really good to produce a separate category like this? The next few postings will take a careful look at some examples which might be called Dark Tourism - but which might also raise some other thoughts about what is going on.
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An Uncomfortable Theme

19.08.06

Museums are usually based on collections of objects, but in Cincinnati there is one based on a theme. In its title it is not called a museum but a "Centre", so maybe we need to think of it as a heritage centre - which is what it is about - but that phrase has been given derogatory associations. 'Museum' has connotations of quality, of serious intentions and perhaps altruism.

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center has those objectives. Cincinnati has a large Afro-American population. It also has its share of social problems and these sometimes have a racial component. Educational centres are important here - the unique Cincinnati Museums Center plays a key part in city life for schoolchildren and adults. There have also been new tourist developments immediately across the Ohio River that splits the built-up area between Cincinnati to the north and Covington and Newport to the south. The Ohio River divides Ohio from Kentucky here. The two states have different backgrounds, one more industrial, the other more agricultural; one supposedly urban-smart, the other rural-dumb. Both of these old dichotomies are of little value or accuracy in the conurbation across the river here. In some ways the Kentuckians to the south have stolen a lead on the Ohioans. On a Sunday, for example, the busy urban life is in Newport at the new Levee Development with aquarium, shops, cinema, restaurants. It's just one reason for a new tourist development in the big city centre that is Cincinnati.

For a city with a large black population the Ohio River divided slave states from free states. Kentucky was a slave state, Ohio not. So it made sense - and it extended the work of the history museum in the Cincinnati Museums Center - to make slavery the theme of the new project. Slavery, however, can be a divisive issue: the story of how blacks were helped escape from slavery using the so-called 'Underground Railroad' has the potential to unite. And so it has been. The Center (using the US spelling in formal titles) uses film, video, still pictures, oral history recordings, music and three-dimensional exhibits to tell a dramatic and moving story. Both blacks and whites helped slaves escaped, both risking their lives on many occasions to do so. The striking new building is on the Ohio bank, looking towards the former slave state, but in front of it is a famous local bridge which unites the formerly contrasting communities, and the Center does so, too. It's design is of a high standard, it's audiovisual presentations effective. There is clearly an element of prestige bound up in the scale of finish of the Center which might present some headaches to the financial people, but the story of slavery told here, while uncomfortable to anyone with a grain of humanity, is one of opposition to that system by people from both ethnic groups involved.

It is refreshing to see difficult social issues chosen as the theme of a major new attraction, rather than the easier success stories of wars won and material progress achieved.

[In the picture, the tower is part of a building behind the Center].
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Tourism Driving Renewal - 3

13.08.06

One of the earliest tourism-related city regeneration projects was that of Baltimore, Maryland, in the USA. It was proposed in 1954 in response to the city's long decline in manufacturing and harbour activity. Much of what it achieved was not built until much later as new tourist attractions were added around the Inner Harbour, but earlier, non-tourist service buildings with offices, apartments and public spaces made inroads into decaying areas during the 1960s. There is now a long list of additions including hotels, an IMAX theatre, science and industry museums, a major new aquarium, events spaces and Harborplace with shops and restaurants. Water-based activities include a late-eighteenth century frigate and a World War II submarine preserved here, a marina and harbour tours. A former power station has been converted into restaurants and a bookshop using eye-catching architecture. Harborplace was said to have attracted more visitors in its first year than Disney World - 18 million.

Innovative programmes such as 'Homesteading' led to old properties being sold off for a dollar to anyone promising to renovate and occupy them for at least eighteen months afterwards. 500 units were taken up. This was followed by 'shopsteading' creating 60 new stores in buildings sold for $100 each. A 'Salvage Depot' was opened to recycle useful bits of demolished buildings such as windows and building materials. New housing has been developed and the transport network improved - though a proposal to drive Interstate Highway 95 through the Inner Harbour was rejected after a head-on clash between the public and the planners.

Ideas from Baltimore have spread out to other cities worldwide. Visitors from around the globe have in turn poured in to the city, bringing it much needed new life.
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Getting the Low Down - Low Down!

12.08.06

What thousands of enthusiasts have said millions of times is true: travelling is best done at ground level. OK, time and distance make flying inevitable for much of the time, but having got close to your destination, get down to the real thing - down on the ground. And take it s-l-o-w-l-y. See what is to be seen. Make sense of what you are seeing.

You may prefer being cocooned in your car, but social travelling is fun and far more interesting. If your fellow travellers are from the same place as you, share your thoughts about what you find. If they're locals who just hopped on board, say hello and share their views on the neighbourhood. It adds another dimension to the picture you're getting by just your own efforts. See another side of the situation. Understanding a place is satisfying.

Jet aircraft are the worst ways of seeing the world - unless the sky is clear and the earth below is not too far down. It might not be on offer - or affordable - but a high-wing prop plane skimming a couple of thousand feet up gives a great view of places. So does a helicopter if you can stand the noise. Trains are better (that's the California Zephyr crossing Nevada in the photo). Buses are good except for being confined to a small space. Get on a bike if it suits you. Or best of all walk!

We had a campaign for real ale and there's another for slow food. How about a campaign for real travel? - slower, down to earth and sympathetic!
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The Ancient Art of Tourist Promotion

09.08.06

Travelling the tourist trail of the American West didn't develop by chance after the trans-continental railroad was opened in 1869.

The Union Pacific Railway Company, one of the main partners in that great enterprise, turned out publicity material aimed at getting leisure travellers using its services. The guide book shown is from 1864 and liberally illustrates its pages with engravings of mountains, cascades, forests, cities, mining camps and railway wonders. The promoter's methods are already in use: Pacific California is labelled 'The Golden Coast' and the San Francisco harbour doesn't have just an entrance but a 'Golden Gate'. A lake becomes 'an emerald gem'. Platte Canyon has 'Cathedral Spires' - mountain peaks. The guide book wasn't necessarily the inventor of phrases like these, but it was one of the channels of communication which spread such promotional images.

Another was the journal Atlantic Monthly published in Washington, DC. In April, 1869, the month before the trans-continental railway was opened, one Samuel Bowles began a series of monthly articles about the event. He referred to the need to see the west “before the tribe of guide-book makers, newspaper letter writers, journal keepers, and photographers have ‘done it to death’ with pen and collodion”.

Nothing could be more guaranteed to speed the flow of tourists to see the region before it was spoiled – and the spoiling process was begun by Samuel Bowles himself urging people to get out there quickly. Just as the finding of gold in California spurred thousands to try their luck, the reporting of the new opportunity to see this remarkable landscape for themselves would begin a process equally influential - the tourist rush.
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Tourism Traces - Riffa House

08.08.06

At the side of the road from Harrogate to Pool in North Yorkshire stands Riffa House. On the front and each side are painted, in huge letters, advertisements proclaiming "The Riffa Refreshment House - Good Accommodation for Cyclists - Good Stabling". Lettering on the front has been obscured by what appear to be the newer, substantial, bay windows on two floors. Though I have driven this road several times - though not for a year or more before last sunday - I haven't seen the lettering before. Has it just been uncovered of later paint or plaster? Some words on the right hand side are obscured.

Googling 'Riffa House' produced no results - a bungalow offering B&B was the main response. I would love to know more about the story of this particular set of tourism traces.
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Happy Returns

07.08.06

Yesterday's Historic Commercial Vehicles Society gathering in Harrogate came at the end of the annual Transpennine Run from Manchester. This Wallace Arnold excursions coach of 1958 was a reminder of holidays in the 1950s. The design of the coach looks dated with the mid-sided door position, split windscreen and chrome trim. The luggage compartment is smaller. But it was the kind of vehicle that attracted nostalgic admirers happily seeing some old friend return.

Also at the rally was a London Routemaster bus. It was from the 1960s and also dated in design - rear, open platform entry, small compartment for the driver alongside the external bonnet of the engine. But it looked so familar as this kind of bus has been such an icon of postwar, tourist London and a few are still operating on tourist routes. Transport acts as a foundation for tourism and it often provides some the attraction - especially when it's stylish and different.

The Harrogate rally looked smaller than when I last went to see it in the 1980s. There was no programme or catalogue of the vehicles and no HCVS stand. I had searched the web for details before setting off, to check the route and the best times to see participants on the road, but could find nothing. Harrogate's own web site was little help - in late July it only gave me July events. I didn't see any signposting until arriving at the Stray where it was held - following a couple of preserved lorries. At least it was a free meeting with plenty of parking space and an informal, friendly atmosphere. It had that ambivalent attitude - on the one hand 'just a gathering of transport that could be viewed by the public', but on the other an event failing to promote either its cause or the important stories that its vehicles have to tell. Which includes the struggle to preserve them for future generations to enjoy.
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Creme de la Cream

06.08.06

Afternoon tea (or elevenses, lunch or evening meal) in Betty's is an institution in some of the posher bits of Yorkshire: Harrogate, Ilkley and York. During the day it's likely you will have to queue - it's worth it. A nice lady finds you a table and another nice lady, dressed a bit like posh children's nannies used to dress, takes your order and brings you food. To a certain generation of Brits there are similarities to the 'nippies' who used to serve in Joe Lyons' tea shops, but the resemblance is superficial. The food is wide ranging and either Good For You or jolly scrumptious according to your taste. Yorkshire Fat Rascals and curd tarts, lemon sorbets, salmon and salads go with cups of Indian or China tea or something alcoholic. They each have a shop where chocoholics can feed their habits and the clientele can find a nice cake to take home to great-aunt Maud. You can even sign up for a cookery course with staff tutors at a weekend venue. The founder gave the company a Swiss flavour to some of the menu. None of it - Yorkshire or Alpine - is to be missed.
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Tourism's Jet Set

05.08.06

Travel always needs wheels. Stage coaches, trains, cars, the landing gear of planes: no wheels, no tourism - at least for most people. You could hire a horse.

Not far from Scarborough is Whitby, home to the famous cliff-top Abbey, to Captain Cook's sea-going career, to the patent slug-powered thunderstorm detector (grand-daughter Jessica still doesn't believe that one) - to the writer of Dracula - and to the jet set. But not the up-to-the-minute high-flying kind. This jet set is a few million years old and is buried in the cliffs west of Whitby. But it still needed wheels - and it did its bit for queen and country and for tourism.

No-one knows for sure what jet is. The black, shiny, hard material is more mineraloid than mineral - not quite a mineral like copper or tin or coal, that is. It might be close to coal, formed from wood, decomposed and compressed under enormous pressure within layers of rock. Or it might be from the sap within the wood, trapped in holes and compressed. Amber is thought to be a near relative.

The stuff is found in other places in Europe, too, but in Whitby it reached its greatest fame. Though used for jewelry since many years BC it was after Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert died and she went into deep, black mourning that it became popular in Britain. The Queen, and so the nation, adopted the fashion for black clothing and black jewelry. Jet supplied the need. An industry employing 1,500 people sprang up. Men called 'jetties' scoured the cliffs for usable lumps of the material and sold it on to craftspeople. It sold not only in Britain but in Europe and the USA. It was worn by the Victorians and by the 'flappers' of the 1920s, determined to show that a girl just wants to have fun, to dance and to attract the men. Even so, the association with funerals led to a decline in its popularity: workshops closed and trade declined.

Whitby, however, thrives on its associations with its past just as much as it does on its fishing, sailing, fish and chips and fun. Workshops still make ornaments and items of jet. Jewellers show it in their windows for sale to visitors wanting a special souvenir of the place. One workshop-cum-retailer has the Whitby Jet Museum extending from its sales area. Here, as in the photo, are set out the treadle-operated wheels which cut and polished the jet in days gone by. These working places were dusty and they were dangerous. Accidents were relatively common and deaths from shattering wheels not unknown. Modern methods take more care, using better tools for the trade. And now tourism might be helping bring about a revival in its fortunes as the young tourist who has jet-setted abroad takes an extended weekend in a resort closer to home.
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A Tourism Sidetrack

04.08.06

At a station on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway stands a carriage. It isn't waiting for a steam locomotive to take it away down the track. This coach is waiting for visitors to move in, cook food, admire scenery, go off to bed. It's a camping coach and definitely stays put.

Introduced in 1933 in Britain as a way of getting people to travel by train to a station and base their holiday there, they were an immediate success. This was partly due to their low cost of £3.00 per week and partly to the fast-growing fashion of camping - not necessarily in the sense of individual tents, but of organised camping grounds with tents provided, or as with these coaches, a more solid structure. Three years later Billy Butlin was to open his first chalet-land holiday camp at Skegness, a development of the tented camps which had been run for around 40 years.

Within two years there were 200 camping coaches at 160 locations, run by each of the 'big four' railway companies. Old rolling stock was pressed into service, positioned on suitable sidings and equipped with everything that was needed.

During the 1950s and 60s competition and changing fashions removed most of the coaches from holiday use, but a few still exist, some of which have been set up quite recently as unusual and well-appointed accommodation. This one was (I think!) at Levisham station; another is at Goathland, both on the NYMR. Coaches like these can earn useful money for preservation societies; railways always need good sleepers.
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Tourism Traces - Scarborough

03.08.06

This drab little spring can make some claim to being the source of British seaside tourism.

Almost completely ignored by holidaymakers, it stands part way down some steps to the beach by the Spa building on the South Bay of Scarborough. In 1626 a local woman, Mistress Farrar, decided that water appearing here, which stained rocks red, was good for people as it had curative properties. Dr Wittie of York wrote books which advised people to travel to the coastal town to drink the spa waters. A long list of ailments could be cured, according to him, such as "melancholic vapours, epilepsie and jaundice" and even healthy people could benefit from swigging it.

Before long the town had built a wooden shed to operate the spa. In due course newer buildings appeared, culminating in the group of Victorian meeting halls, shops and restaurants that stand there today. Swimming in the sea, digging sandcastles, riding donkeys and eating ice creams took the place of drinking the iron-tasting water from wells here, and almost all that is left today is this red-brown dribble. Other spas like Bath and Harrogate were inland. Scarborough led the way to the sea for generations of holidaymakers to come and earned itself the label of 'Queen of Watering Places'.
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Naval Warfare

02.08.06

HMS Exeter makes a tight turn close inshore to engage the enemy. Her battery of 8" guns will swing to starboard and deliver a broadside against the sea wolf that has been attacking British convoys. Not that anyone is sure any longer just which country that sea wolf is supposed to represent.

While medieval knights jousted in Scarborough Castle, the twice-weekly 'Naval Warfare' drama was being re-enacted on the lake in Peasholm Park. Since 1927 (except when hostilities moved to the bigger stage during World War II) the ducks on the lake have regularly looked on bemused as battles raged. The ships are scale models around 6 metres long, the main ones having a young man sat inside operating battery-powered propellors and pyrotechnics simulating explosions.

The first ships were based on the First World War, but those of the late 1940s modelled themselves on HMS Ajax, HMNZS Achilles and HMS Exeter that had fought the battle of the River Plate. Over the decades each has been replaced as the vessels wear out. While the names of the River Plate battle have been kept, the enemy of the time has been allowed to fade in to history as the influences of PC and EC have brought changes. Now, the raiding battleship is called the Robert Eaves, with no real-life ship as its model, nor connection with any particular country. So, come on, Scarborough tourism staff - just how was the name chosen?

Spectators watch the warfare unfold from the terraces in front of the lakeside cafe. The usual pedal-boats are moored out of the way for the half-hour or so of the show. A commentary with a nice mix of respect and sly humour describes the events and brings a touch of melodrama by getting the crowd to boo and hiss at appropriate points. Electronic keyboard music has warmed up the viewers, drawing upon suitable war and Disney film scores. There is a little guide book with the story of the show, and both it and the live commentary point out that nowadays the whole thing is done for fun. There must have been a number of mums and dads telling their children what it is all based upon. Perhaps the kids did some reading later and even asked granparents what they might have done during the war. Or just sympathised with the ducks being chased by dreadnoughts.
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Authenticity Again

01.08.06

A family gathering spread over a week on the Yorkshire coast has given plenty of opportunity to enjoy being a tourist in the area.

At Scarborough Castle a 'Knights' Tournament' included displays of archery, falconry, music and horse-riding skills. Four competitors rode their horses around a small arena set out in the castle grounds, throwing javelins at straw targets, smashing cabbages with a mace and tilting at a revolving target - a 'quintain' - with a lance. In the picture a competitor grabs a mace from a helper for the next part of his circuit, which was reducing the cabbage to pieces. It might be some way from the 'real' life of the middle ages with its loudspeaker commentary exhorting the audience to "put your hands together for the winner", but it can do what books, or teachers, can't do - bring home via all five senses the kind of action that a tournament involved. It had some participation by the audience in cheering their chosen rider, spurring him on to be faster, more daring, more accurate - and to be the winner. It helped raise money for English Heritage, who must care for and interpret the history of the castle. And of course it mixed some education with lots of fun.
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