Making Sense

Shining a Light on Dark Tourism?

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.  Within the last few months the Sharpley and Stone-edited book "The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism" has been published and I will comment on it in a later posting. 

The Lennon and Foley 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 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 

Nothing Set In Stone

This isn’t the place to attempt a survey of the controversies surrounding Stonehenge. It would take several pages. Getting everything agreed and the place redeveloped is probably impossible. 

There is the issue of access to the stones themselves. Many people demand to be able to walk round them, touch them, make real contact. Some of them have religious philosophies as the basis of their wishes – contact with such ancient objects is essential to them in order to complete their feelings of experiencing mystic truths. Others want to examine the stones close up for more prosaic historic or scientific reasons. Between these ends of a spectrum come people who want to be amongst the stones on midsummer’s day so they can see the sun rise above the horizon. And those who want to find inspiration for their music-making, painting, sculpting or dramatic productions. 

Against these are those who fear direct access would lead to vandalism or theft or people making political statements using banners attached to the monument or even chaining themselves to it in order to demand someone be freed from jail, or prosecuted, or allowed to do things presently decreed illegal. The anti-access people worry about sit-ins, love-ins, demonstrations and publicity-grabbing musical or theatrical performances. Others have a simpler concern, and that is that the monument would lose its air of drama and mystery once crowds of tourists were allowed all over it. 

The next, and biggest problem, is that of the surroundings of Stonehenge. Should the adjacent road be diverted away so that a major twenty-first century intrusion – traffic – is removed from disturbing that ambience of mystery? If so, how could that be done at acceptable cost and without damaging still-uninvestigated archaeologies nearby? Should a tunnel be built – at enormous expense? The present government has rejected this proposal on grounds of cost. What about the visitor centre? You might ask, what visitor centre, since only service functions are on hand at the moment. There is no interpretive centre. If one is built, should it be close by or far away? Above ground or out of sight somehow? 

You could add questions of foot access for visitor with mobility problems. Should a road-train be used to move folk around, as has been proposed? Ought commercial services be allowed close by? Should the King Arthur Pendragons of this world be allowed to advertise their concerns and beliefs? 

No wonder that famous statement in Parliament twenty years ago about Stonehenge being a disgrace is still relevant today. 
 

Stonehenge Described

The audio commentary at Stonehenge works well. Whoever supplied the voice is very competent. The description is clear, well delivered. The script is well written. For me the overall effect of what I heard - and I didn't listen to every bit of it, nor can I recall it all - was that the monument retains its mysteries. It was not used for sacrifice. It was not a giant, stone-built, astronomical device. It was not used by druids or any twenty-first century imagined culture. Its builders were skilled, not primitive prehistoric ignoramuses. They were not people like ourselves with our twenty-first century outlook on life. Neither were they stupid or lacking in imagination. Whatever they were building in different forms during different centuries was highly significant. Their structures required knowledge and resources that would challenge us today if we had to build them without modern, powerful tools. What they did was impressive. 
 

Stonehenge: National Disgrace?

 

With American relatives visiting as part of a family gathering in West Sussex last October a trip to Stonehenge was bound to be high on the list. My daughter Victoria had been before, many years ago, but her husband Jay had not. Neither of them is the sort who would look uncritically at what must rank as close to the top of every American-to-the-UK visitor's list. They knew of the problems of the nearby main road, the cramped and worn parking and entrance facilities. Jay, especially, having heard stories of the monument and pictures in books and films based on it, was keen to see for himself. 

It must be quite a few years since I went to Stonehenge. It looked then virtually as it does now and my memories of it were fairly negative. This time I could see all the usual problems but felt a bit more positive. That's not to say that it needs the road moving, the entrance shifting and making much better with a proper visitor centre and so on. I do like the fact that people are kept off the stones. Having visitors clamber round and over them would destroy them visually and also physically. The chain link fence doesn't do anything for the place except make it look like a defence establishment. 

Very noticeable by one part of the car park is the grey-bearded figure calling himself King Arthur Pendragon. He operates outside the car park by standing in an adjacent field but has banners are posters fixed to the wooden fence. ‘King Arthur’ chats to anyone with an inclination to talk to him. I can’t say I had much interest myself as I tend to avoid anyone seriously presenting themselves as characters from history: re-enactment societies are a very different kind of thing. This gent’s message – his campaigning point – was that artefacts had been removed from Stonehenge for research or show elsewhere and they should be returned as they were sacred to the people who used them around the monument. 

 

A landmark site like Stonehenge gets claimed as being ‘sacred’ in one sense or another to all kinds of people – druids, pagans, history geeks, environmentalists, astrologers and several shades of politicians with axes to grind or flint arrowheads to chip. Most of them are numbingly didactic about their beliefs and impose them on the rest of us whenever they can. It does not respect a site like Stonehenge to treat it in this way, nor help to unlock what are still the great secrets of this prehistoric landscape.

A Curious Case of Heritage

 Somebody in a university heritage management class once day started a discussion about heritage and how important it was in tourism. I asked if anyone had heard of Robert Hewison’s book “The Heritage Industry”. Not one of them had. Perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising as they were only toddlers when the work appeared in 1987, and it faded from sight after a huge amount of initial publicity in which every columnist and commentator seemed to jump onto a journalistic bandwagon, usually siding with Hewison. I suggested to the students that they should read the book, and also look for Patrick Wright’s “On Living in an Old Country”, published two years earlier, and to my mind a much better book, and David Lowenthal’s “The Past is a Foreign Country”, also from 1985, and a work of great scope. It reminded me of some curiosities about the discussions in the mid-nineteen eighties about ‘heritage’, especially since I recently acquired a copy of Frank Atkinson’s autobiography “The Man Who Made Beamish”. 

At the time Hewison’s book appeared I was Public Relations and Marketing Officer for the Calderdale Inheritance Project in West Yorkshire, some notes about which appear on another page in this web site. It was a regeneration project which achieved a great deal, alongside other, longer established work by local Civic Trusts, an organisation called Pennine Heritage, and, indeed, other departments of Calderdale Council, which led the Inheritance Project, and for which I had been Tourism Officer from 1978. Many, many people from voluntary bodies, the Council and what was up to 1986 West Yorkshire County Council, plus some commercial companies, had since the late 1960s been slowly building up a wide range of initiatives to re-use derelict mills, shops and houses, to clean up eyesores in open spaces long abandoned, and to remove some of the highly inappropriate ‘redevelopments’ which had butchered elements in a remarkable industrial landscape. I had quickly come to the conclusion, along with others, I’m sure, that the Calder Valley was an area above most others where the changing effects of the industrial system on human communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be seen. 

Hi-Tech History

There are lots of reasons for being fascinated by history. Old-style teaching was once about kings, queens and ‘national heroes’ and new-style is often about the Horrible Histories approach, neither of which are appealing to me. The first is, at least for recent monarchs, just public relations for remote royalty. The latter is for teenagers who like squirmy stories.

My kind is the stuff I can relate to followed up by the bits that help me make sense of the first lot. So being from a textile family background, for example, and at the same time a frequent user of computers, the machinery in the Armley Mills Industrial Museum in Leeds strikes a chord. In 1801 a French inventor, Joseph Marie Jacquard, devised a weaving machine – a loom – which could produce complex designs. Punched cards were used to control how the warp and weft threads appeared in a cloth. This enabled the different colours of the front-to-back and the left-to-right threads to show in different combinations. Jacquard’s invention helped expand both the textile industry and the associated fashion trade. A hundred years later the firm which became IBM was able to speed up the United States’ census analysis by using punched cards – not for control but to represent different results which could then be sorted mechanically. Punched cards were later used in computers to feed instructions and data in to processing units – controlling the process. My first job after university was in a computer centre where thousands of such cards were used for engineering and other tasks.

So history, the story of human activity since the year dot, covers lots of interesting subjects. That is why millions of tourists enjoy, at one level or another, historic places. And for the tourism manager anxious to understand how this huge sector of the industry works, finding a path into the treasure house of history is the way to succeed.

History As Trend Analysis

Having seen (in the previous posting) how popular in the market history is – or at least, let’s say, heritage tourism – it’s obvious that anyone in tourism marketing and development needs to know something about history. However, you could say that people like visiting historic places because those places have a different ‘flavour’ and they find that interesting, but communicating the history can be left to the guides at the particular place. There is a lot of truth in that – if you are an amateur manager. 

A professional in this job would have several reasons for wanting to know the history themselves and not leave it to someone else. They would want to know just what it was about the history that was attracting people. Was it the sense of place and time to be found in the surroundings? – the kind of buildings and environment, such as would be found in a medieval town or an industrial community, for example. They would demand to know how well the guides and other forms of interpretation were performing in communicating the historic story. They would want to be a step ahead of the visitors in knowing what period of history was gaining in popularity, possibly because of the influence of the latest novels, film or TV series. Alongside that, what kind of history was catching the public imagination? Once upon a time it was about kings and queens and national heroes. Today it is often the story of ordinary people, their ways of life and events in those lives. Any marketing director or development officer who does not keep up with this kind of knowledge is risking being taken for a ride – and I don’t mean a quality coach tour but a brief hurtle through a theme park concoction of the past. 

There is another important reason for having an interest in what has gone and that is because the marketing manager needs to think about the future. Confusing? The reason for looking back in order to plan for the future is to see what the trends have been. In a broader sense it is a matter of finding out how we got to where we are in the tourism industry today. What were the reasons, the causes of change and the influences on the choices that people have been making? We talk of Push and Pull Factors, of innovations and failures. How we make sense of the airline industry and the changes it is going through depends on looking back over aviation activity since the late 1940s – at least. What will be the outcome of the present situation for the major airlines including the ‘flag carriers’ like BA, Lufthansa, Qantas or Aeroflot? Many factors come in to play, not the least of these the growth of low-cost or ‘no frills’ airlines. To understand why these have been successful at the expense of the big companies it’s necessary to read up on the likes of Southwest Airlines, Freddie Laker’s Skytrain, easyJet and Ryanair. In doing so you’re studying history. 

That exercise would be looking at relatively short-span history. Important, broad, lessons come from longer spans such as the three centuries in the graphic above. It’s a great simplification of course, to relate the Grand Tour to the eighteenth century, countryside touring to the nineteenth and overseas beach resort tourism to the twentieth. But the point being made is that the changing face of tourism can only be properly seen by examining causes and effects. So the Grand Tour largely educated the sons of wealthy landowners who travelled by horse-drawn carriages around to destinations such as Rome. In the nineteenth century railways became available with cheap transport to take people out of the new industrial cities with their dirt and disease to places like the Lake District. In the twentieth century aircraft became dominant for the longer journeys that the up-market customer was demanding, again with elements of escapism from a mainly urban lifestyle that was often stressful. Yes, it was much more complex than that, but this pattern, crude though it might be, is a starting point for comprehending not only where tourism seems to be going, and why, but what exactly it is all about. 

And discovering the detail is what makes the study of history such fun.

[Photo: Statue on the Grand Palais, Paris]

 

Sinking Higher Education

University budgets to be cut ... Peter Mandelson wants more two-year degree courses .. 

Coming after years of unwise, over-rapid expansion of higher education where resourcing failed to meet the new targets by miles, the cut backs already in progress are only driving the knife in further. So more cuts equals much more damage. In the commercial-style marketing world that universities find themselves they are having to pretend they have innovations in hand able to ensure the same high quality. It's an impossibility. Something has to give. 

Administrative staff are having to apply for their own jobs at lower salaries as part of 'restructuring'. Vacant teaching posts go unfulfilled or else specialists in one area get packed off to teach on or manage courses where they have little of the required skill or knowledge. They feel let down, even ashamed, of their new positions. 

Two-year courses run the high risk of being seen as inferior. Very good mature students can do well, but others are put under severe strain by the twelve months a year teaching demanded with little time for reflection, personal projects or refreshing time out. 

Course managers for all subjects are placed under pressure to ensure results are at least good, preferably outstanding, in order to bring new students in. Watch out for sudden jumps in the number of First Class and Upper Second degrees awarded next year. Then ask whether they result from better teaching or else deliberate changes to the system in order to mark higher. 

If that happens, those students who did achieve excellent degree and diploma results in the past will have had their awards relabelled as mediocre. I get a sinking feeling.

Touchy Feely History

I thought we had come a long way in the seventeen years I have been in higher education when I think that in 1962 we still used chalk on blackboards and now computerised data projection, DVDs, animated lecture slides and colour-printed handouts. In ’92 overhead projectors were the state of the art, and students doing presentations used the advanced technique of uncovering bullet points one-by-one, slipping a sheet of paper away from the text as they talked. 

In 1962 I began teaching full time in a secondary school (before university: you can’t do that now) using chalk on those dreadful roller-blind “blackboards”. It was possible to borrow a film from someone like Guild Sound and Vision (free, because they were made by sponsoring companies) and that was it. You might find a slide projector in schools but there were few slides. My own school had got an epidiascope with glass lantern slides and a way of clamping a printed picture underneath so that a system of bright lights and lenses shone the image on a screen. There was an ink duplicator, messy and almost limited to reproducing typewriter text only. 

Where I was teaching there was a spirit duplicating system. It was far more primitive than the ink duplicator, but, miracle of miracles, it could print in seven colours – simultaneously! A paper master sheet had to be drawn on, colour by colour, using tinted carbon-copy sheets to make the colour original. Then it was pressed onto a gelatine block, with enough of the colours transferring to enable the printing of about 25 copies on paper pressed one after the other onto the block, by hand, until the colour ran out. At least, that’s how a I remember it, and I see that the system is still encouraged as a very low-cost, low-tech facility in less developed countries. 

Which is all by way of introducing the illustrations below. They were produced by hand and typewriter as reading material for a school visit to places in North Staffordshire by some of the children I was teaching. It was 1964. I see from a name on the nine foolscap pages (13” x 8” – none of that A4 business) that the pictures were drawn by one of the pupils. Step forward Robert Wood, wherever you are now, 45 years later. Take a bow with thanks for helping out. These were mainly history notes and pictures about the past at our end of the County.

The only out of school activities then were sports events and an occasional visit to another school for some kind of stage entertainment. History was taught by chalk and talk and a few standard posters from a distant schools supplier. A more resourceful teacher might take some kind of objects into class in order to illustrate a point. That would be all. So one day Bernard Gilhooley, the history department head, and myself took a busload of the children to a nearby town and then into the city of Stoke-on-Trent to show them mills, canals, potbanks and different kinds of housing. They loved it. History in the classroom, however well described, is still an abstract concept. 

Out in the actual world all five senses can come into play – sight, sound, touch, smell and even taste (try the oatcakes sold outside the pottery factory). It’s a three-dimensional stage set on which life is acted out for real. It’s an interactive experience where questions can be asked of the people you meet. It’s a powerful social experience too – full of the encounters with the people out there, but also between those making the journey, sharing reactions, thoughts and opinions. Maybe the most memorable benefit is the fun which sweetens the learning situation and gives more confidence to the youngsters discovering their world that they can make sense of it by getting out into it.

 Books are still needed. Teachers are still needed, stood at the front in the classroom – but a bit of one-day tourism adds a whole spectrum of educational benefits. Whether it’s history and geography, social studies or biology doesn’t really matter. Whatever the heritage is, getting out there to examine and question it is what makes it possible to live with it.

Variations In Historic Location: Paris

It should be straightforward to say that the view along the Seine towards Notre Dame is one of a historic location. The cathedral, bridge and other buildings are all old: some very old. The same goes for the gallery in the Louvre Museum with its glass cases – clearly a historic room with historic artefacts. Anyone visiting the Louvre or Notre Dame has some kind of interest in things historic. What about the sculptures of men holding clocks in front of their faces? Modern art. Not historic – not yet. The building, however, was the Louvre and we have just d¬¬¬escribed it as attracting visitors because it is historic. Are the modern art figures? The stumbling block here is the definition of ‘historic’. At one time that would usually mean from the time of the Romans or earlier. In the 1950s it often meant pre-Victorian, although serious historians would talk about the much more recent past using that term. On the other hand, buildings requiring protection from redevelopment were generally more than a century old at the time. As interest and knowledge grew about history – heritage, preservation and conservation – during the sixties, so did the desire to save ever more recent buildings – St Pancras Station (1868), the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea (1935), Centre Point, London (1966), for example. So here is a question: when does ‘history’ come into play as opposed to the idea of ‘the present’? Yesterday? A minute ago? Ten years ago? That photo of the clock-carrying figures was taken in 2007, so surely it is historic?

The same consideration must be given of the Pompidou Centre (1977) in the left-hand photo. It was, and still is, decidedly modern. But it is over thirty years old..... so – historic?

Now look at the cafe in the Left Bank area of Paris. A modern cafe in architecture and decor, though part of a much older building. Nowhere special, perhaps? Try telling that to the owner.... and since my wife and I breakfasted there every day for almost a week in 2007 it is pretty special to us. It’s part of our personal history. Does a place, building or artefact have to be outstanding, famous, to be described as historic? No ... except, of course, to the owner or to us it is outstanding and famous – it’s a matter of relationship to people. Like beauty, history is in the eye of the beholder.

What about a field of pumpkins? Growing in 2007, objects of the present in that year. Not historic. Except that they were growing in the restored ‘Hameau de la Reine’ at Versailles, the playscape village built for Queen Marie Antoinette. There she could pretend to be a countrywoman, milking cows, harvesting pumpkins, while safely sealed off from the reality of rural poverty in mid-eighteenth century France. So those pumpkins in the picture are part of something – historic.