Past Historic

Industrial Tourism in Hawes, North Yorkshire 

Following on from an ‘Along the Way’ posting recently, it was interesting to make another visit this week to two examples of industrial tourism in Yorkshire. 

In May of 1992, the Dairy Crest Creamery in Wensleydale was closed. 59 jobs were lost. Production of the local cheese was moved to Lancashire from the town of Hawes. Within a few months, a team of managers from the plant along with a local businessperson bought the former creamery from Dairycrest. By Christmas, Wensleydale cheese was being made there again. 

Over the ensuing two decades, inspired marketing has turned the business into one of Britain’s outstanding cheese-making operations with a wide range of basic and specialist products. These are sold directly to the public in an on-site shop as well as through supermarkets and small stores round the country. Part of the success is owed to turning the dairy into a tourist attraction. Visitors can see cheese being made, sample the products and buy them in the shop, and eat in either the cafe or the restaurant in the complex. A souvenir shop sells gifts of the usual kind. The marketing effort added the making of a link to the Wallace and Gromit movies – Wallace’s favourite cheese is that from Wensleydale – priceless high-quality publicity for the produce. Another creamery has been acquired near Ripon and 200 people are now employed. 

Almost forty years ago, the rope-making firm of W R Outhwaite, also in Hawes, changed hands. Tom Outhwaite was the last of the family to run the business there. It had its origins in the very early eighteenth century. The Outhwaites had taken it on in 1905. As Tom retired a young couple from Nottingham, Peter and Ruth Annison, moved to Hawes. Both had been college lecturers. They bought the business. As with the Creamery, they turned partly to tourism to make it successful on a larger scale. Visitors could see ropes made for a variety of uses from animal leads to church bell-ropes, candle-wicks to colourful crowd barriers. 

The old rope-works shed was replaced, though the new structure was kept carefully matching the footprint of the original. Over time, two extensions were built, the second a large stone factory unit along the edge of the former Hawes railway station car park. Next to the actual track stands the Dales Museum with a large Tourist Information Centre. Although not in the town centre the combination of car parking, TIC, museum and rope-works makes a great deal of sense. New staff has been taken on as the business has expanded. The Annisons have also been involved in efforts to extend the diesel-hauled heritage railway that runs from Leeming Bar to Redmire. The dream is to take it as far as Hawes along the former British Rail track bed. Could it even go further – running up the Dale to meet the busy line of the Settle and Carlisle line? If it did, there could be a link between two important mainline services operating alongside the Pennines. 

These two manufacturing businesses in Hawes illustrate again the long-established usefulness of tourism in supporting industrial growth. They also show just how commercial marketing works hand-in-glove with community redevelopment. Seeing tourism marketing as a purely commercial concern misses the point. Commercial- and community-led tourism have been in a symbiotic relationship for over two hundred years. 

[03.03.12] 

Book Review

Creating Colonial Williamsburg
Anders Greenspan
2002: Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN 1 58834 001 5 (pbk)

It's easy to think of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia as just another theme park. This presentation of eighteenth century American colonial life has to compete with numerous other Disneyesque tourist attractions. There is the usual danger of step-back-in-time-ism (an offence that should lead to a long jail sentence) based on what looks like a costume pageant set in some kind of trans-Atlantic Ruritania. It’s clean, polished, smiling and tranquil. The first time I visited, in the early 70s, I had no idea that it was anything other than an open air museum for which a rather pricey ticket bought a film show followed by a day looking at a series of exhibits. Spending a couple of days there in the summer of 2005, I realised that I could walk from my motel along a street of Williamsburg houses, past some shops, turn left, and along the main street of the historic area – for free. My ticket this time bought me what it did last time: the introductory 1957 film, “The Story of a Patriot”, a short shuttle bus ride, and access to inside many of the buildings which make up the project’s attractiveness. What it encompasses is a part of the straight-forward city of Williamsburg, but one which has been conserved, costumed and largely created to tell the story of America on the eve of independence. Nearby are the Jamestown historic centres, recalling the days and events depicted in Terrence Malik’s 2005 film “The New World”, and Yorktown, which was the site of the British army surrender to the colonists under George Washington.

Colonial Williamsburg is different. It is just part of the city, even if a very differently managed and presented one. This is not what we in Europe might call a city: it feels more like an attractive town of low-rise, low density construction. Open spaces and parkway roads define the landscape as much as do town buildings. The movement to conserve some of the remarkable buildings scattered amongst the main street shops and filling stations of 1920s Williamsburg took time to create what we see today. Anders Greenspan’s book, published under the imprint of the prestigious Smithsonian Institution, tells the story, and how the emphasis changed gradually from rather cosy Americana towards something which looked at, and presented, some of the less comfortable components of Virginian life – the basis in slavery, the hard life of less privileged people and the role of women in the community. It has been a story which needed to tread a careful path between what visitors, often from the north, expected to see, and what residents of the state, born in the values of the south, would allow to be shown. Pride in American independence in the inter-war years was one thing, pride in being a bastion of democracy in the second world war another, but both were easy things to celebrate. Introducing black faces and recalling domestic hardships were much more difficult if visitors didn’t want to be reminded about them. And the Williamsburg project was bound to be expensive, so success depended on those visitors being happy to spend money on tickets, food in the inns of the town, and goods in the shops.

Greenspan’s book – prominently available in Colonial Williamsburg’s excellent bookshop – is often critical, but always fair and detailed. The demands of the physical conservation programme, the visitor interpretation and the background developments which made it possible are thoroughly examined. As a history of a history project it rightly avoids the kind of misleading theorising that sometimes obscures the understanding of complex and changing interpretive schemes. His book brings out the educational basis of the town. Just as school-based education has changed and evolved, so this kind of tourist attraction as grown with the changing values of the community at large. This is a book which must be read by anyone wanting to know better how that has happened.


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