My Hotel Sailed Away

Take a trip to the middle of Finland and stay in Savonlinna, and you can have a 1903 lake steamer as your hotel. The Heinavesi is a tour boat with two main decks and rooms accessed from narrow walkways round the outside. A tiny cabin is equipped with bunk beds and an ingenious table which folds to reveal a wash basin with taps. Folding it backs tips the water into a drainage pipe. The showers and toilets are round the deck: no ensuite living here.

Savonlinna is at the heart of the Finnish lakeland, a wonderful area with thousands of wooded islands, many linked together by footbridges giving the most delightful of walks, with real forest hiking also a possibility. The winters, of course, mean snow, but the long summer days - almost 24 hours at this latitude - are idyllic and peaceful. The town has a castle to explore and a maritime museum with a collection of ships, some of which set off into the lakes.

If you have a cabin on the Heinavesi and go off to explore the castle or islands during the day, lock your door. The ship takes passengers on board for a cruise and your hotel will sail off around the lake. Don't worry, it will be back for tea time.

Fascinatin' Rhythm

British TV in the late 1950s used to show some popular short films by Slim Hewitt. They each showed industrial machines making things. It wasn't always clear just what the bobbing levers and spinning wheels were producing - the fascination was the rhythmical images, almost abstract in their style, of mechanical busy-ness.

A modern set of documentaries from a Canadian film company has similar fascination. How It Is Made usually show three or four production processes varying, for example, from cakes to carpets. They are in colour - Hewitt's work was black and white - and there is a characteristically sparse and concise commentary by Tony Hurst. They show more than just machines - occasional people appear - but the focus is literally upon the production of goods by machinery. There is no drama, no plot, hardly any human element, but the films avoid being sterile technology (especially of the often-seen 'mega-machine' genre) through the everyday nature of the goods being made - pencils and egg-boxes have featured - described by Hurst's carefully measured sentences. The French-Canadian producers use factories near at hand so they avoid the obvious - coke cans being turned out are not for you-know-who but a company probably unknown in Europe. Catch them in the UK on documentary cable channel - they're an antidote to the bizarre type of reality show and have a delightfully fresh appeal.

Tourism Grew In Stages

Motorway service stations in Britain were apparently planned to be every twelve miles, something like the maximum distance a car suddenly registering an empty fuel tank could travel before it finally stopped.

Along the western coast of North America the Spanish settlers built missions a sensible mule-ride distance apart. The missionaries could move north from San Diego de Alcala along the chain of 21 centres as far as San Francisco de Solano.

As pioneers and settlers of the United States moved into the new state of California a network of horse and wagon trails was set up. Taverns offering food and lodging were opened to serve them. Cold Springs Tavern (pictured) still supplies food to travellers near Santa Barbara, a cool shelter from the hot midday sun.

As the railroad pushed west the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe company took on English-born Fred Harvey to build hotels and restaurants the distance apart that a train would travel in a day - round about a hundred miles. The Fred Harvey Company gained a reputation for good service by well trained (no, that's not a pun) female staff - made even more famous in the stage and film musical The Harvey Girls. The Company opened up tourism in many parts of the south west by running tours from railway station stops to places with fine scenery or native American communities.

So travel development out west was driven by what can be called the four modes of travel: exploration, conquest, business travel and leisure tourism, with transport modes to match.

For more discussion of tourism and its growth, see www.alanmachinwork.net

Connections

What is the connection between a lake in Cumbria, a house in Leeds and Trotsky's secretary? And how do they relate to a whole new tourist industry said to have been created by some birds and females warriors in the 1930s? By a man who probably never heard the term 'market development'?

On The Button!

Science museums are everywhere. This display of electrical activity is at NEMO, the Science and Technology Centre opened in Amsterdam in 1997. It is housed in a building shaped like a giant ship, and given its dockside position next to the collection of the Dutch Maritime Museum it is very appropriate. Only some people might say it doesn't really look like a ship.

There are science museums in many cities from San Francisco's Exploratorium to Melbourne's Scienceworks Museum. As usual they are often thought of as the latest fad with everyone trying to jump onto the band wagon. As usual a better opinion looks back eighty years to the Deutsches Museum of Munich, opened in 1925. Another, deeper, dip in to history turns up the fact that the French revolutionaries of the 1790s wanted to have a collection of technical equipment on display with an attendant to explain how things worked. Sadly, the plan was not put in to action. Other collections were assembled during the nineteenth century, notably that of the South Kensington Museum in London, later to become the Science Museum, but they were largely collections of objects arranged in stationary exhibitions.

The point about the Deutsches Museum, established by the visionary Dr Oskar von Miller, was that it aimed at comprehensive coverage of science and technology, and many things worked. The visitor, or a museum guide, could push a button and see the wheels go round (or pistons go in and out, levers up and down and whatever). The aim now was to display not just an artefact but a process, an action, a dynamic and informative exhibition. It was still a historical viewing rather than a statement of the present or exploration of the future, but it was hugely influential. Other museums installed their own working exhibits. The Palace of Discovery (Palais de la Decouverte) in Paris opened in 1937 with university students explaining to visitors how scientific experiments worked. In Vienna, London, Chicago and Toronto teaching was the aim - or from the visitors' viewpoint, discovery. Children's museums in San Francisco, Boston and Bristol, England led the way to 'non-historic', interactive, demonstration exhibits using a growing range of new technologies. The NEMO centre in Amsterdam is a recent addition.

And it isn't about the past but the present; in fact it is as much about the future as the vast majority of its tourists are forming ideas that will shape their part within it. NEMO is about the unknown and the still-to-be discovered.

Tourism Driving Renewal - 2

Shropshire's famous iron bridge of 1779 has given the village at one end of the bridge its name. Cast iron was used to span the River Severn here, instead of stone, in order to show off what the local ironmasters could make for their customers the length and breadth of the land. Versions of the bridge even appeared in Europe and the Caribbean.

The industry of what was then usually referred to as Coalbrookdale (a side valley nearby containing the main iron works) prospered for several decades. However, as Birmingham and other places with more extensive resources began to build their own mining and manufacturing centres, the Shropshire village and its neighbours in Madeley, Dawley and Oakengates began to struggle. By the middle of the last century there were large areas of dereliction and decay.

In 1964 the new Labour government designated the area as one of its 'new towns' and set up a publicly-funded Development Corporation to transform and develop the district. Later named Telford after the Scottish engineer who was also Surveyor of Shropshire's Roads and Bridges, the new town was given an extensive new road system linked to the railway, a new centre with shopping and offices, and factory estates.

The villages of Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale were within the Telford boundary and the achievements of the eighteenth century were used heavily to landmark the new town and give it a sense of identity based on industrial pioneering. Tourist promotion figured heavily, especially as the Development Corporation supported a new Museum Trust aimed at conserving the industrial heritage of the Severn Gorge area, a heritage which is both extensive and unique. Without the Corporation's funds, staff and activities the Museum would probably have been far less successful. From a company museum owned by Allied Ironfounders in 1959 to the Museum Trust developments, mainly between 1973 and 1978, the creation of a series of heritage-based attractions and tourist infrastructure turned a declining area into a once-again busy set of communities.

Top: During the main development phase of the Ironbridge Museum, the Friends of the Museum gave essential support in research, sales and guiding visitors. Here, Ken Jones talks to visitors at the Open Air section of the Museum at Blists Hill around 1974.

Bottom: Jockey Bank in 1974. These derelict buildings were on the road down in to Ironbridge. The overwhelming local view at the time was that they were beyond usefulness and should be demolished. Museum staff such as the Curator of Technology, Stuart Smith, argued otherwise over a long period of time. Finally the group of cottages was restored and is an example of what can be done when people look beyond what appears to be the obvious line of action.

Powering The Industrial Revolution

There is an interesting argument, but unsupported by direct documentary evidence, for the view that tourism was used to create the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and therefore the world.

The River Severn cuts through a deep gorge in Shropshire where it runs fast and deep, especially at times of flood. In the 1770s a plan was advanced for a new bridge across it to be made of stone. It had to be built of a clear, single arch because of barge traffic on the river. Ironmasters such as Abraham Darby III and John Wilkinson put forward the idea of using cast iron instead. This was done and the arch was completed in 1779. At its northern end a hotel was built, funded by a 'tontine' in which members invested money. The bridge was paid for out of the fund and surplus money invested. As time went on and members of the tontine died the sum grew, to be claimed finally by the last member living.

Paintings were commissioned of the bridge, notably by the London-based artist Michaelangelo Rooker. These tended to emphasise the spectacular nature of the gorge. Engravings made from the paintings were printed and sold or given away. Even press advertisements were arranged extolling the scenery and drawing attention to the fiery iron furnaces which could be viewed during both the day and the night. Prominent visitors made the journey to Shropshire, often from London and abroad, and they took away ideas about the new, industrial, system and what it could produce. It looks likely that this activity was being deliberately fostered in order to sell industrial expansion. While it was not tourism in the modern sense and scope, all the elements appear to have been there.

Don't Go There ...

... is the title of a UK Guardian newspaper feature on tourist attractions in Britain. Taking its cue from the new Rough Guide to Britain it lets a dozen journalists have a moan about their least favourite attraction and then invites readers to join in. Some of the entries are thoughtful, like Martin Wainwright's complaint about Haworth, overrun by tourists who look as if they don't have the faintest idea why they're there, except that they thought everyone else was going so they shouldn't miss out. Steven Morris on the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, Wales, sums it up as being about mud and guilt. I thought it a kind of 'muddle as built', a strange concoction of ideas only half thought through, and with a poor sense of purpose.

But what to make of Emily Wilson's bizarre view of the Eden Project (pictured)? "an IKEA-style car park" (I wish our Leeds branch was anything like as good) ... "not as good as a garden centre because you can't buy everything you see" ... "lots of flowerbeds whichever way you look" ... and "just greenhouses". She wonders "how Cornwall gets away with promoting the place as a world-class tourist attraction". How many similar botanical gardens have you seen round the world, Emily? If you really expected a serious botanical project to be a cross between Trago Mills and a Wyevale Garden Centre, then you certainly failed to do your journalistic homework.

It's interesting that nine - maybe ten if the London Eye is included - of the twelve attractions are of a kind which set out to communicate some kind of message about subjects like art (The Tate), history (The Tales of Robin Hood), some literary sisters (Haworth and its Parsonage), technology (Machynlleth) or botany (The Eden Project). Several complain about the cost. If someone enjoys a visit then the cost is more likely to be acceptable. If they don't enjoy the show, it's either because the show was bad or the visitor chose something unsuitable for their day out. Having been twice with a grandchild living in nearby Plymouth I can report brilliant days out which led to the said child's mum buying a season ticket and returning several times. More than that, the seven year-old was inspired to see if he could set out a 'nature walk' in his local woodland.

The problem with Machynlleth when I went - admittedly some years ago - was that it appeared to limit its efforts to doing alternative things without clearly showing why this was relevant to everybody's life. There was virtually nothing given for free or available to buy that would inspire the visitors to run their lives differently in some way. The awful Earth Centre near Doncaster was worse. It lacked a sense of purpose. The people who set it up seemed to take for granted that the public would understand why it had its strange collection of displays and why it was developing in the way it was doing. Just why was it relevant to have a Mongolian-style yurt in this bit of South Yorkshire? Colleagues who went to the opening ceremony said that visitors were wandering around bemused.

A good tourist attraction can't afford that. There's bound to be a journalist around somewhere.

Communication Towers

We are used to radio transmitters and cellphone masts and retail park signs and marquees. They're all towers built to allow communication of one kind or another. The reason they are there is to do with commercial organisation and technological advances, but the principle is not new at all. Beacons were famously used across Britain to warn of the approach of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and later to spread news of anniversaries to be celebrated. Church towers and spires were there to communicate as well. They symbolised God in heaven, above, and acted as landmarks to guide travellers towards them when roads were poor and signs non-existent. Their decoration spoke of saints and sinners, local noteworthies, and the perils of human frailties.

Secular buildings were also statements in the language of architecture: castles for power, Victorian town and city halls for civic pride and organisation. Lighthouses identified their own location by their flashing-light code while they warned ships away from rocks and shoals. Nineteenth century businessmen vied with each other to built highest inorder to flaunt their wealth and the religious and political cause that they were supporting. Disney's fairy tale castle speaks of European mythology and modern visitor management since all roads in Disneyland lead to and from its turrets. Ever since people were able to place one stone on top of another for some utilitarian purpose they have by the action made some kind of statement to those passing close by. The builders transmitted information and the viewers interpreted the messages and the world went round a little further.

TV Tower Attracts Tourists

The TV transmitter at Emley Moor in West Yorkshire is the UK's highest free-standing structure at 328m (1,084ft) and visible for many miles around. It carries BBC, ITV, and Channels 4 and 5 plus other communication networks. A steel tower stabilised by cables was put up in 1964 but collapsed in 1969 when ice formed on the guy lines and overloaded the structure. The present tower is a reinforced concrete, tapering tower with a lift inside, and makes an addition to the tourist attractions of the area: those who drive up to it can park in a special layby which used to have an information panel about the transmitter. It's signposted from nearby road junctions - from a distance it acts as its own signpost!

Travellers' Tales: Los Angeles v San Francisco

"Nineteen suburbs in search of a Metropolis" said H L Mencken of Los Angeles in 1925. "A circus without a tent" wrote Carey McWilliams (1946), while Winston Pegler referred to "that big, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities". Harlan Ellison said of the city in 1980 "It is in most ways America in microcosm, but more it is the cutting edge of america. What happens here happens five years before anywhere else in America".

In Los Angeles, "Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars" (Fred Allen, 1941). Jan Morris (1980) said of it: "Hollywood, the Versailles of Los Angeles". A local real estate agent in 1929 boasted "All the world knows Hollywood. All the world wants to come to it. You can go to the naked savage living in darkest Africa, to the untutored Aborigine, and you can say to him 'I live in Hollywood' and what will he say? He will reply 'Yes, boss, I'm thinkin' of moving' there myself".

Of San Francisco: "perhaps the most European of all American cities" said Cecil Beaton in 1955. Cyril Connolly was more mixed (1947): "a city of charming people and hideous buildings, mostly ereceted after the earthquake [of 1906]". "San Francisco is essentially a night city, and next to Paris, I should say it was the gaiest night city in the world" according to Maurice Baring back in 1913. Robert Louis Stevenson was even more definite in 1883: "What enchantment of the Arabian Nights can equal this evocation of a roaring city".

The Transworld Getaway Guide of 1975-6 claimed "When you get tired of walking around San Francisco, you can always lean against it ... [it] is beautiful in the way that a young girl in an absolutely crazy miniskirt is beautiful". "Everybody turns up here" said a friend to G A Sala around 1882, "they're bound to do it". And they still are ... but less so in Los Angeles, by the way that travellers have reported the lesser of the two great cities: the one is of beauty, the other of ugliness.

The Environmental Cost of Peace?

A group of Chinese tourists in Amsterdam in April. Large numbers of tourists from China are expected to visit countries beyond their home land over the next few years. China itself is opening up as what might turn out to be the world's biggest tourist destination. Since the last world war the Japanese have begun to travel, something few of them did before. Since the Iron Curtain rusted away and was pulled down people from eastern europe have begun to travel west and, indeed, to every other point of the compass. If, in the future, more of Africa can become prosperous enough that more of its inhabitants, not just the wealthy, can travel, then it will add to the fast-changing patterns of movement around the globe. Apart from the further expansion of the tourism industry world-wide, there must be at least three other effects. First, the chances are that guests and hosts get to understand each other better, and engage in dialogues face to face, rather than from behind heavily defended frontiers. Second, the management of those dialogues has to be seen as of primary importance if encounters between peoples are going to have any real meaning and positive effect. Third, the pressure on transport, especially by air, is going to result in a gigantic increase in traffic and pollution problems unless it is handled better. Will the cost of global peace have to be met by sacrifices to the environment?

Dumb Steeple

Close to the busy intersection of the A644 and the A62 west of Mirfield is this stone column. We have often noticed it and a blue plaque fixed to the wall behind it, but stopping in a car is very difficult at this point. A quiet Sunday early morning made it easier, thanks to an entry in front of a gate almost opposite.

The structure is known as Dumb Steeple. It's 26 feet high in millstone grit with a ball on the top. There are no markings or words anywhere upon it. The blue plaque says it was probably a replacement for an earlier landmark guiding travellers to the Cowford, a crossing point on the River Calder nearby where Cooper Bridge now stands.

It was near here that a Luddite 'army' gathered to attack Cartwright's Mill at Rawfold, Hartshead, on the hill above the area, in April 1812. Local hand-loom weavers and workers were fearful that the new mills would deprive them of their livelihood so tried to prevent their operation by force. The mill owner had armed yeomanry waiting in the mill. When the rioters entered the mill yard fighting broke out and several rioters were shot, three being killed.

There are other stories about the landmark and its odd name. Not far away is the place where Robin Hood is suposedly buried in the woodland around Kirklees Hall. He, too, was said to have gathered his followers at this spot at one time.

Now the road junction is decorated with signposts, traffic lights and street lights and the silent Dumb Steeple's stories stay unheard to drivers passing by. At one time it would have been as welcome as a modern road sign in reassuring travellers that they were on the right road to cross the river, in their case by the ford, today by Cooper Bridge.

Tourism Driving Renewal - 1

In 1959, Robin Huws Jones of the University College of Wales, Swansea, was making a train journey back to the town. The route into the station took him across the lower Swansea Valley, at that time a scene of growing dereliction on a large scale. To the west of the town is Gower with 23 miles of cliffs, bays, beaches and marshland gathered in to the first UK Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to have been declared. Those beaches attracted tourists, virtually all of whom would cross the valley by train, car or coach, being given a memory of a repellant industrial wasteland.

Huws Jones had the idea that something had to be done. With colleagues in the university and the Borough Council he pushed for the creation of a project team, a partnership which would regenerate the valley at a time when that buzz word had hardly begun to circulate. Over the next years the Lower Swansea Valley Project cleared the decay, planted trees and encouraged spending on new factory estates. Ground which had been poisoned by watse from the town's old copper industry was dug out and fresh topsoil spread. the River Tawe was confined by a barrage which created a strip suitable for water sports. A hotel was opened and a new attraction, Plantasia built where the main road route into Swansea crosses the river.

The Project was one of the earliest in the country and was owed to the realisation that visitor impressions are highly influential in industrial areas as well as tourist places. Swansea has seen many more improvements over the years since then and has itself become more of a tourist destination - the new Welsh National Waterfront Museum was recently opened there. In recognition of its status, Swansea has become a city, with the track record of having pioneered some of the earliest tourism-related regeneration in the country.

Photo: A view of the valley taken around 1963

Herge At A Hundred

The creator of that famous world traveller, crime fighter and reporter, Tintin, was born in 1907. George Remi, known as Herge from the pronunciation of his reversed initials, was born in Brussels. Exhibitions and events will be held throughout 2007, with a display of his work opening in the Pompidou Centre, Paris, in December this year. The celebrations will themselves will spark off more tourism as people travel to take part and to view them.

The first adventure, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, appeared in January of 1929. By the time Herge died, part way through drawing the twenty-first book in 1983, the adventures had taken in much of the world. The period spanned huge changes in politics, culture and prosperity. The growth of new and more techincally advanced media allowed more and more people to discover, at least indirectly, what the world was about. Many of those people could become travellers to see for themselves. Opening up the colourful and varied horizons of his readers was just one of Herge's achievements.

An examination of the original artwork also reveals, when compared with later versions, those changes in attitude towards the world. Early drawings showed Belgium as a colonial power, and its colonial peoples crude simpletons. Russia - the land of the Soviets - was a communist state, untrustworthy and internally divided; the United States a home for criminals and corruption. Most comics of the time, wherever they were produced, contained this kind of stereotype, but Herge moved on in the post-war period towards something much more enlightened. At the same time his graphic style became very distinctive and sophisticated, much more conservative and accurately drafted than that of so many other artists, but crisp, and full of action and fun. At the heart of all the stories was the sense of escapism and excitement as the characters drove, sailed and flew around the world to places that most readers could only dream of, from the mountains of Himalayas and the streets of Shanghai to South American jungles and the depths of the oceans.

• The Herge Exhibition opens to the public on 6 December 2006 at the Pompidou Centre, Paris

Jolly Holi Follies

Holiday resorts from decades ago produced some of the most eccentric architecture in Britain. If a trip to the coast was supposed to let you get away from it all, the visit also got you away from the regimented rows of city streets and the rectangular rural fields. While children's authors like Arthur Ransome and Garry Hogg were tempting jolly families into holiday adventures on boats and bikes, landowners were creating magical, mysterious places for them to explore. We usually call their creations 'follies', but didn't their sense of fun have a wisdom if its own?

At Thorpeness on the Suffolk coast, north of Aldeburgh, is the 'House in the Clouds', seen in the background of this photo. In 1910 a Scottish barrister, rich from money invested in Russian railways, and named Glencairne Stuart Ogilvie, bought huge tract of land here and built a holiday village, primarily for him to entertain family and friends. A boating lake, a coutry club and golf course, and various 'Jacobethan' style cottages were built. Rather than have an ugly water tower in this flat landscape, Ogilvie had his contractors convert the village tower into a strange structure looking like a red-brick house on top of five stories of a plain black 'house' with domestic windows on every corner. Water was pumped up from a converted windmill moved to the site, the sails powering a drive shaft laboriously drilled down through the mill's central post to machinery below.

After the founder's grandson died in 1972 much of the village was sold off. It has a population of around 400, but this shoots up four times in the summer as holidaymakers arrive.

Glad To See You

A photo taken over forty years ago in Russia prompts thoughts about ethics. A coach party of tourists under the care of an Intourist guide had stopped for a picnic lunch travelling towards Smolensk. A farm cart with three people on board came past, being overtaken by a car which was about the only other vehicle in sight for some time.

Out came the cameras. The Russians were not asked if they minded their photos being taken. They looked a little self-conscious, but was it embarrassment or shyness? It's easy now to think that here were the western tourists taking photos to show their friends back home how primitive Russia was, how simple the people, how much better and right was Britain, the USA, Canada and Ireland from which the tourists came. Questions of ethics are always loaded by prevailing ideas of morality. What if the travellers had taken no photos of such scenes, but just of the baroque palaces of the Tsars and the wealthy? Would it have been ethical not to show such conditions, but to give an impression of prosperity when there wasn't any? Should photos only be taken with the subject's permission - difficult to get if you don't share a language. And how would you photograph a happy crowd?

In Moscow the tourist party met Red Army soldiers in a park. Someone dared to move to take a photo. The soldiers waved their hands to stop him, then grouped quickly together in a suitable pose of friendliness, smiling and waving while everyone took photos. Were they really being friendly to these bourgeois travellers or just putting on a front to present their country better? What is propaganda and what is prying?

Douglas, N (1996) They Came For Savages: 100 Years Of Tourism In Melanesia, NSW, Southern Cross University

Smith, M & Duffy, R (2003) The Ethics Of Tourism Development, London, Routledge

The World's Oldest Buildings Need Attention

Older than Stonehenge, the Pyramids or the Ziggurrat of Ur, the Ggantija temples in Malta are the earliest surviving constructions of mankind. The name means 'Giant's House' although the roofless, single-storey remains might look much more domestic than the Egyptian pyramids or the trilithons of Stonehenge. They form a single structure within which are two sets of 'rooms', five in each, shaped like semicircles and generally called lobe-shapes. Whatever rituals and functions were involved is not clearly understood, though carvings and statuettes from here and from almost two dozen Maltese temples suggest they were religious in nature. These temples were built from around 3,600BC. Stonehenge was started around 2,950BC and the famous pyramids at Giza around 2,500BC. The Ziggurrat of Ur followed about 2,000BC. Yet who has ever heard of Ggantija?

The Ggantija temple stands on the island of Gozo, the smaller of Malta's two main islands. The country receives over a million visitors a year, a high figure in relation to its size, with most of them from Europe, especially Britain and Germany. Malta has less than half a million population and is a tiny country with many priorities for its economy. The range of archaeological remains is staggering for such a small place, covering more than 5,000 years and everything from temples to World War II defences. The Ggantija site is poorly presented, with no visitor centre, poor entrance facilities and little interpretive provision. Scaffolding supports parts of the stone walls as it has for many years.

Help should be close at hand, however, as a reorganised management body now called Heritage Malta has been upgrading the National Archaeological Museum and other sites such as the Hypogeum, a complex of rooms cut out of the living rock in Hal Saflieni, and a temple group at Mnajra and Hagar Qim have been undergoing highly professional improvements to their conservation and presentation. Plans are drawn up for Ggantija - and then those upstarts at Stonehenge and Giza will be put firmly in their place - or rather, their more recent age.

The New (And Unfamiliar) World

A statue of the North American native Pocahontas stands at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of the first successful colony within the future United States of America. Very different cultures were to meet in the tidewater lands of the Atlantic coast, cultures which were to clash as often as they benefitted each other. Ultimately the North American native peoples lost out to the power of European settlers, leaving fragmented remains which have usually been taken over and re-presented through alien narratives. The story of Pocahontas was 'whitened' to make her a princess who loved a settler, saved his life and gladly adopted his ways as her own. T he Disney cartoon sweetened the narrative like a European fairy-tale. Close to the site of the original Jamestown settlement an open air reconstruction with buildings and three replica colony ships tries to present an accurate picture in three dimensions of the first little township. The visitor experiences the climate, the smells and even tastes which were part of the early years. They can touch objects, plants and animals known to the settlers. There are people in appropriate costume, human elements in the re-staging of the colonial beginnings. A visitor centre nearby shows a film about it.

The most recent cinema feature presentation of the story is Terrence Malik's The New World, intelligent, lyrical, evocative - and itself a world away from the style of Hollywood. It was reported that when it was released in late 2005 some cinema-goers walked out before the end because they found it boring, maybe incomprehensible. It is not a film of horse-riding redskins circling the wagon train out in the western desert. It is a realistic portrayal of how English colonisers met up with American native peoples and began the long process of living amongst them in the forests of the creeks and river valleys on that coast. Cartoon, feature film, open air museum and visitor centre each tell the stories in their own way and we make of them what we want according to our own perspectives.

All photos used on this web site are by the author except if captioned otherwise.

Shakespeare's Family Tree Sold for Souvenirs

In the photo: a guide shows visitors around the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, shortly before it opened its first season of plays.

250 years ago, the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare at his house New Place in Stratford-on-Avon was chopped down by a man called John Ange. This was done at the request of the Reverend Francis Gastrell, owner of the house. Gastrell had become exasperated by tourists looking for the tree. On hearing of the event, a crowd gathered and broke the windows of the house to show its anger. The Rev Gastrell was forced to leave the town for a while.

A clock-maker, Thomas Sharp, bought most of the wood and began to make a steady stream of trinket boxes, cups, cribbage boards, nutmeg graters, knitting sheaths and busts of Shakespeare. Over the years he added similar wood to his stock to increase his trade, but disguised the fact that it was not from Shakespeare’s tree. Other tradesmen claimed to have purchased the rest of the wood, but Sharp denounced them as charlatans and, anyway, succeeded in undercutting them. In 1765 a walnut tree, which stood opposite Shakespeare's birthplace in Henley Street, disappeared and shortly afterwards copies of the Westminster Abbey statue of Shakespeare made from it begin to reach ready buyers.

Story told by Christian Deelman in The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (1964) published by Michael Joseph

Will Work Experience Disappear?

I often quote one of our students who said she thought she would come back from her placement year three years older. Spending a year in industry as part of a sandwich course in Tourism Management has a remarkable effect on students' attitudes and experience. That student was visiting her university halfway through the 48 weeks and had already realised the effect it was having on her. She knew more about the business, knew more about how well (or badly) the theories she had learnt related to the real world, and above all she was maturing. Students like her have their first professional job added to their CVs and so have an edge over those without such work experience. Many are offered permanent posts with the organisation where they spent their year - I can think of examples in local government, mueums, tour operators, museums and hotels.

Many students preparing in their first year to find a job in their time out find it a worrying prospect, which is quite undestandable. It's that rite of passage between being an amateur and becoming a professional. If they lived at home they have the security of family during the process of starting a job, but in university they are already in an unfamiliar situation if, for the first time, they live away. Of course it is a challenge and a daunting one, but having achieved the year out they gain enormous confidence and perform much better in their second academic year. Out of hundreds who have been through it I have seen almost none who was other than proud and pleased that they had done it.

Now, getting a university place has become more of a buyer's market. Open competition, pressure to recruit high numbers and to keep them is pushing the system towards allowing students to fasttrack. Instead of a degree taking four years - with the fees required - they can opt for three, academic-only years. Some courses in some universities are this year seeing large minorities take up that option. Those first-year students often say they don't feel ready for a placement. The response is to take the view that prospective students will play safe and apply to universities that offer that route, so the easier course must be available. Faced by the pressures set up by changes in governmental policy, it is of no surprise that both students and university managers find themselves in this situation. Some tutors are coming to the conclusion that within three to five years the sandwich course will be like that famous culinary one offered by British Railways - drying up, curled at the edges, and heading for the dustbin.

From a Trickle To A Flood

Around 1626 a Mrs Farrow noticed reddish-brown water trickling from a spring at the edge of Scarborough's South Bay, and after a little bit of beta-testing decided it was good for you. From that small start 380 years ago has grown the tourist industry of present-day Scarborough, which still makes the claim that the town was Britain's first seaside resort. Visitors began to flock to the new resort, which built itself a wooden spa hut round wells which supplied the medicinal water and organised women to sell it to visitors. An earthquake in 1737 demolished the hut and almost the whole industry in a mudslide, but digging around discovered the spring once more, and a couple of years later a replacement hut went up. Fine stone buildings were erected in the nineteenth century and the new steam railway of 1845 began to pour people into the town.

Sea, sun, sand and socialising attracted them, but so did the fun of finding new places filled with lots of interest. Away from the cares of the everyday world it was easier to enjoy this kind of new encounter. In a way the beach and enclosing town was like a stage on which people could create their own mix of entertainment. Sociologists have called it an intermediate zone, away from the working world but not quite in the challenging zone of the other, the really unknown, foreign climes across the sea.

Scarborough brought little windows on the world to its visitors. In 1829 the Rotunda museum was opened and later came Wood End Museum and Art Gallery, an Aquarium, Italian Gardens, the Japanese Gardens of Peasholme Park, and of course there was the castle dominating the town from its position between the two main bays. Scarborough has long enjoyed a strong events tradition ranging from indoor and outdoor theatre to the Naval Warfare show at Peasholme - still operating in the summer as it has since 1921. The Aquarium is long gone, but the Sealife Centre in North Bay has been added. The Italian Gardens have disappeared, as has the Pier in North Bay which allowed people to 'go to sea' without getting their feet wet. Boat trips still operate on short excursions along the coast. Inland of the town are the uplands and forests of the North Yorkshire Moors with nature trails and visitor centres. For a time Scarborough had a Heritage Centre built by the owner of some of the biggest amusement arcades, but it was on a restricted site by the harbour and could not get planning permission for a cafe, and it has closed. Perhaps also the town has unofficial zoning related to market segments with fun and frolics by the harbour and windows on the world around the edge of the cafe and beach district. Placing a Heritage Centre amongst the crowds must have looked to make sense, but without parking it was at a big disadvantage. and it could not expand its services. Scarborough's stories are told best in places away from the candyfloss.

It is fashionable in the tourism industry to talk about 'special interest tourism' when looking at holidays spent around museums, sporting activity centres, cycling and other supposed minority activities. That seems to lose sight of the fact that historically, geographically and socially those things always played a part in ordinary, mass market holidays. Most forms of tourism started for reasons of 'special interest' and in the case of the seaside holiday it was health and recuperation, meeting other people and exploring new places. Scarborough has had mixed fortunes in its tourism trade over the centuries, but it still thrives as living proof of the rich variety that a good resort can offer. What counts is a strong mix of interest with something for all those who make a visit, and the town certainly has that to offer.

Getting Into The Real World

When I first taught in 1962 in a secondary school, I was told by a teacher soon to retire that the mark of success in education was the distance that teachers put between themselves and the classroom. His world-weary, perhaps realistic meaning was that advancement in education meant becoming a school manager or even a teacher-training college lecturer. Ted had spent his life in the classroom but felt that recognition only went to those who moved out.

Since then I have realised that there is a quite different meaning, at least for teachers of geography, history, natural history and a few other subjects. My own school days were enhanced by dedicated geography teachers who took us out into the world to see for ourselves what it was like. The photo here is from a very dated 8mm image shot by one of the participants in such a trip. Boys who were rowdy in class could be highly responsive once outside it in very practical sessions where things made sense. It was fun hunting for minerals in Peak District quarries. From a hillside we could see how everyday life in a village made patterns in the landscape. Between the wars as more and more teachers did put a distance between themselves, their pupils and the classroom, they opened up much more exciting vistas which beat the blackboard - and even the lantern-slide projector - hollow.

Town That Never Was

Between Scarborough and Whitby are the remains of a failed tourist destination. Ravenscar is now a point on the Cleveland Way footpath and spectacular views of Robin Hood's Bay. The National Trust cares for land there and has an information centre. At the beginning of the twentieth century an entrepreneur began to build a new town here, laying out roads and sewers. Some houses were built. Unfortunately it was a misconceived idea. It's a beautiful place, especially in good weather, but the site is very exposed at the top of high cliffs. There were few takers even though the Scarborough to Whitby railway served the hamlet with a tiny station. By 1913 the project folded. The Raven Hall Hotel - built in the eighteenth century - still thrives, as do the Foxcliffe Tearooms and some B&B accommodation. Raven Hall was owned by Dr Francis Willis who 'treated' King George III for madness, and there is a story that the king was brought here, away from the public gaze. That and tales of smugglers are almost all that is remarkable about this otherwise attractive spot which failed to draw new residents a century ago.

The photo shows buildings by the former station, the platform of which is in the foreground. The tearooms are at the right-hand end. The cars stand in what would have been the station forecourt. The Cleveland Way uses the old trackbed.

Intent On Travel

A hundred years ago, what is usually considered the first permanent UK holiday camp was set up in Norfolk. In 1906 J Fletcher-Dodd organised a camp for socialist families in Caister-on-Sea. Six years before, a men-only camp had been held for a short period in Douglas, Isle of Man. After World War II it opened for families as well. Early camps such as these were simple gatherings for political or religious groups in the same way that nineteenth century excursions had brought together people sharing similar philosophies on day trips. The camps were like informal conferences where participants could live together for a while, sharing attitudes and activities.

Seventy years ago Billy Butlin opened his famous commercial camp in Skegness, setting a new fashion for holiday entertainment, especially when it was wet having fun and games organised by those staff in red blazers, the Redcoats. Butlin's highly organised style of holidays has gone with the age that created it, but his principle of all-in accommodation and entertainment has continued and led towards modern developments such as Sandals and Club 18-30.

The principle went further, with Boy Scouts and Girl Guides after 1907 running camps and jamborees, and later, after 1941, Outward Bound Schools adding tented expeditions to their programmes. Even airplane-based package holidays to the Mediterranean owed something to canvas accommodation as the first Horizon package flew to Calvi, Corsica, in 1950, where the tourists slept in tents though using a toilet and washing block and a drinks bar made of bamboo.

The humble tent helped to pioneer much of modern tourism in the fifty years from 1900 on.

Five Little Words That Say ....

... "The server threw an exception" ...

Meaning ... "this is a rubbish operating system. We at Microsoft present it in a patronising way because idiots like you shouldn't even be attempting to use it. If you knew what you were doing it wouldn't have happened in the first place".

Or: "This is a second-rate system with a third-rate customer interface, designed by keyboard geeks with no understanding of users, working to a corporate style manual".