Counter-Tourism: The Handbook (eBook)

Lies of the Land

Counter-tourism and its tactics originate from the principles of mythogeography – a way of understanding the world and acting in it that privileges space and place above all else. So, it’s not surprising that counter-tourism is similarly biased. When in doubt, it looks to the place to provide the answers. Before this Handbook moves on to the second and third stages of counter-tourism – interventions and open infiltrations – here are a few ruminations on the productive roles of place and space in counter-tourism.

Bed

Close to the centre of Plymouth, a dried-up, fake, miniature canal runs between palms, stone lions and ruined chessboards – part of the excess of post-war regeneration – like an abandoned archaeological excavation of a civilisation that never existed. If you are willing to find your way around a few walls, you’ll find unreal places everywhere – the road to nowhere at the plague village of Eyam in Derbyshire; Tyneham: “the village that died for England”; Chicago: a fake Palestinian town in the Negev Desert used by the Israeli army; Willoughby: a railroad stop in the First Series of The Twilight Zone.

On the square

Look out for the symbols of Freemasonry (block, plumbline, set square, compasses, twin pillars, chequerboard). In English towns they are a blessed relief from the commercial banalities of cloned High Streets. Rejoice in their everyday esotericism (mostly ignored and, when noticed, suspected).

Big Flame

There is a conspiracy-narrative concerning events during the Second World War that occurred on a stretch of deserted pebble beach called Shingle Street on the east coast of England. The story wobbles between a secret, large-scale German invasion, a small incursive German force and some sort of local Allied exercise; whichever it is, the denouement of the tale is always the wholesale incineration of those involved by ignited gas pumped into the sea in hidden pipes, consuming everything in a bubbling ocean of flame.

A few miles away, at the Woodbridge RAF base, an immense runway was constructed during the war for the use of aircraft in difficulty, damaged in raids over continental Europe, returning under the less-than-full control of their crews. In the event of mist or fog adding to a pilot’s difficulties, FIDO (Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation) was triggered and, to burn off the miasma, sheets of flame from the vapours of petrol pumped at a rate of 100,000 gallons per hour were thrown up around the runway.

While both stories are intriguing, which is the most _____________ (insert your own value judgement here)? Credible? Exotic? Meaningful? Significant? Symbolic? Revealing? It seems impossible to escape from what historical narratives can do – reveal, symbolise, summarise, upset – in order to get to some passive thing that might be described as ‘history itself’.

Or have you learnt already that certain questions don’t need to be asked or answered?

Next time you visit a heritage site take a box of matches and observe the site through a tiny sheet of flame.

Simulacra now

Wander film locations. Shelter under Kevin Costner’s tree at Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall.

Search out locations that only survive in their movies, like the site of the Shell Haven oil refinery on the north bank of the Thames Estuary, long demolished; but still preserved, in its matte-adapted form, as the doubly inauthentic ‘Moon Project’ of Val Guest’s Quatermass ll (1957).

The empty space

At ‘Chudleigh Rocks: Gardens, Caves, Nursery and Tea Rooms’ there is a ‘History Hut’; a shaky garden shed full of bric-à-brac: Chinese takeaway menus from the 1960s, pre-war Conservative election posters, early twentieth-century farming implements, a Burmese temple sculpture damaged by US army ‘rifle practice’ prior to D-Day, and various stuffed animals, all rippled by the damp and entwined in the ivy that has entered through the roof. There is a semblance of labelling, interpretation and categorisation, some artefacts have been carefully framed and displayed, while others are piled under tables in heaps. Only in degree and size is this collection any different from those of the great national or city museums – possessing the same conflations, selections, juxtapositions, concealments, suppositions, invasions and cavernous gaps.

Look out for history huts, and remember: museums are just big sheds.

Z Worlds

Look for metaphorical heritage in zoo-botanical-architectural sites:

Was looking at your Z World1 and remembered a tip. If you ever go to Leamington Spa and see the Elephant Walk, there is another cool thing there. At dawn, or close to – early and dewy – the bridge on Dale Street over the River Leam has a spider street between its arches. It is Victorian ironwork and a spider has taken up residence in each arch. Some are immaculately kept homes, pristine and symmetrical, others are a little more neglected, and others still look like half-derelict shambles owned by stoners and squatters. Society in spider street form. Humdrum and magical. Nobody ever notices, but it’s special. I used to go past it every day en route to work and I loved it. Sort of an arachnidan version of the nearby Georgian terraces. And then in nearby Victoria Park you’d have a sort of Glastonbury sprawl of webs over the lawns.

(Message to Mytho Geography on Facebook from Anna Morell.)

Wounded

On Herm (one of the Channel Islands just north of France) an ancient menhir was broken up and its parts used in the making of the island’s dry stone walls. A similar fate befell many of the stones from the henge at Avebury (part of the huge complex of Neolithic sites including Stonehenge), splintered by huge fires set around their bases. Were these markers wholly destroyed? Or was their meaning dispersed?

Psychodemiurgics

The intelligent and emotionally literate ghost movie The Awakening (2011) was filmed partly at Manderston House, an Edwardian country house in the Scottish Borders. The property is open to the public twice a week in the summer. Watch the movie, then visit the house. (If you can’t get to Scotland, find your nearest equivalent site; the more distant the comparison, the better the imaginative leap.)

Is the place already haunted by the visit you’ve imagined making? Do scenes from the movie re-run there? Is there something that the cameras of other visitors detect that yours doesn’t?

Given the collaborative but hierarchical and technically complex nature of commercial film-making, much that is imagined for a film is lost before it reaches the final cut. As theatres are haunted by characters without the actors to realise them, so lost movie ideas haunt their locations long after cast and crew have moved on.

The writer of The Awakening, Stephen Volk, described to me two of its lost ideas: a ghost seen upside down through the lens of an old box camera, and snow falling indoors.

Visit other movie locations and project onto your mind those scenes you imagine were lost from the final cut. Act them out. Imagine snow instead of carpets. See it all, upside down.

Modern Ruins

Battleship Island (Japan), the Walled City of Kowloon, Bannerman’s Castle on the Hudson River, ‘Wonderland’ (a derelict theme park outside Beijing that never opened), Prypiat (the city of Chernobyl), St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross, Sutro Baths near San Francisco (careful, visitors have been swept away and drowned, others haunted by the Giggling Ghost), Saythorn Unique in Bangkok (straight from building site to ruin) … these are the architectural equivalents of the ruins described in Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’, remnants of a once all-powerful emperor’s temple, with its motto “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” disappearing into the sands of the desert.

Life in the round

Keep an eye out for any metaphorical or symbolic space in heritage sites. You may spot clues in the following: government and company insignia, the shape of electricity pylons, chequerboard ground plans, people acting as public ornaments, advertising, heraldry, anything quoted at third or fourth hand or more, these may be referencing a complex system of belief, a mystical order of symbols or a twisted history of pseudo-events.

You may not realise that you are in a metaphorical or symbolic space as you play Hopscotch (Roman military agility training), dance the Hokey-Cokey (see above), fill up your vehicle under the pecten (pilgrims’ badge) of Royal Dutch Shell, find yourself crossing the road to Santiago de Compostela or absent-mindedly making sand castles.

To encourage you to keep searching and asking, you might take an informed look at the National Trust property at A la Ronde in Devon. This sixteen-sided house is presented to the visiting public as an eccentric, but essentially domestic and private space designed for (and possibly by) two slightly wacky (they were unmarried) and reclusive (no, they weren’t) female cousins at the very end of the eighteenth century. The unusual materials (shells, sand, feathers, broken glass, lime and smashed porcelain) used by the cousins and their companions to decorate the house and the strange seaweed wallpaper patterns that dominate its tall eight-sided central room are passed off as innovative, yet...