The people of Berlin are protesting about the large number of tourists who visit their city and I have every sympathy.
Mass tourism is a scourge on society. The enormous buses clog our streets obscuring the very views that the tourists have come to see and eventually the local culture is displaced by an international tourist culture of burgers, beer and bullshit. Local charm is replaced by shops selling plastic beefeaters and pictures of how things used to be before mass tourism.
We all love to travel and from the tourists point of view mass tourism is a boon enabling us to see the world. Without mass tourism many of us would have no experience of anything outside our immediate vicinity.
But mass tourism destroys the thing it loves. A herd of tourists cannot visit a city without damaging it like some socio-economic version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
When a person reads of the Left Bank in Paris he learns of Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway. He thinks that he too must experience this seminal environment and he buys his ticket. But the locals have seen him coming. They know that the age of art has passed and the age of commerce is upon us. So they open themed cafés, bars and restaurants with names like Bar Les Artistes or Le Lucernaire.
When our gallant traveller arrives he finds that he is not rubbing shoulders with writers or poets but engaged in a drinking competitions with a IT Administrator from Milton Keynes. Our intellectual explorer is now in the minority. The majority of the clientele are not interested in culture but feel they should “take a look while we’re here”. They have been sold culture in the same way that they are sold breakfast cereal and aftershave.
Our cities become caricatures of themselves, Ko Samui becomes Blackpool and an Indian tourists sits and enjoys the ambiance of Paris while eating a Big Mac.
The tourist industry markets travel as a liberating experience but mass tourism is not so much a manifestation of freedom as of greed, globalisation and hyper-commercialisation.
The population of Greater London is estimated at approximately 7.7 Million people. Wikipedia considers that London receives 15 million tourists each year and it is a safe bet that the vast majority of these concentrate their activity in central London. At the moment, the tourist industry sees no limits on how many people it can push down the subway at Oxford Circus. This has been detrimental to the quality of life of Londoners and no doubt Berliners suffer similarly and so are right to object.
Industry and commerce have long involved the appropriation of commonly held land for exploitation by self appointed “owners”. Communism recognises this when it declares that “property is theft”. We generally consider this property to be land used for homes, farms or factories and we assume that this confiscation means exclusion of the public but we neglect the public space in between private property. We neglect the commons.
This common space is owned, used and valued by all of us yet government and commerce now seem hell bent on exploiting it to herd around disinterested tourists in such wretched conditions that their goal, once they emerge from their air-conditioned packaging, is to take a piss, grab a burger and get back on the bus.
The Tragedy Of The Commons may sound like a Thomas Hardy novel but is, in fact, a concept used by economists. To quote Wikipedia: “The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.”
The scenario usually given is where common land is used by multiple individuals to graze their cattle. It is in the interest of each individual to graze as many cows as possible yet this will eventually ruin the grazing land to the detriment of all.
One solution often proposed is that the commons should be privatised and access restricted to those with the ability to pay. The owner would then work in his own self interest to ensure that the asset was maintained in good condition. This could mean that the owner would limit access but this is, by no means, certain.
Intuitively I am against the continued expansion of the private sphere and I find modern shopping malls a poor replacement for a thriving high street.
Another way of addressing TTOTC is intervention by local government. Legislation could be implemented to limit use and protect the asset. In the case of mass tourism this might mean metropolitan rules restricting the number of Bulk Tourist Deliveries (BTDs) in a given period.
However, local government derives a lot of revenue from allowing companies to graze their tourists in city streets and officials often see their role as maximising revenue. According to Wikipedia “The Government Office for London states that tourism revenues constitute 10 per cent of London’s gross value added and contributes to the employment of up to 13 per cent of London’s workforce. According to the London Development Agency, visitors to London spend around £15bn each year.”
Obviously cities will not wish to give up this revenue but at the moment we are sacrificing our environment for short term profit. Reversing this trend and protecting our cities will make them better places to live and ensure that they continue to attract tourists well into the future.
Many years ago, over too many pints, I recall discussing the idea of creating a tour operator which would specialise in giving tourists an authentic night out in London. We would offer a standard service tailored to the Japanese businessman and start with a few pints in a local boozer followed by a trip on a big red double decker bus down to Fitzrovia. More pints would be consumed and a Japanese man would be cajoled into thinking that his beer was off and pushed into taking it back to the bar. The barman would be bribed to take a sip, pause, frown and then apologise profusely before telling the Japanese businessman that he had a “very discerning pallet sir”. More beer would be consumed and the Japanese businessman encouraged to approach a specific young woman who would be bribed to slap him soundly around the face.
The frivolities would continue in an Indian Restaurant where large portions of Vindaloo would be consumed and the waiter paid to talk some bollocks about how this was the hottest curry ever consumed. Eventually the tourists would be emptied into taxis and left to find their own way home when hopefully a minority would vomit in the back of the cab and end the night sleeping in a railway station.
The company was to be called Here We Go Tours and we considered that visiting Australians would make the best tour guides.
The 20th century was the age of standardisation, the production line and economies of scale. The 21st century looks set to change all that. From Internet shopping to 3D printing, globalisation and technology are enabling consumers to customise their purchases to suit their tastes. House swaps and couch surfing are two examples of how independent travellers are using The Internet to bypass the mass tourism industry.
Why not go further, why not reject the standardised tours set by self appointed experts and design your own itinerary? In the past this may have been difficult but in the 21st century the tools are readily available. The Internet allows us to research an area, Google Street View lets us wander the streets before we get there and our GPS equipped smartphones allow us to navigate once we get there.
Why not create an itinerary and share it with your friends on Facebook?
The concept of tourists destroying what they visit is not new and was deftly described in a 1975 Science Fiction story by Garry Kilworth named “Let’s Go to Golgotha”. To quote Wikipedia: “In the future period where the story takes place, time travel has been invented and made commercially available. Among other historical events, tourists can book a time-travelling “Crucifixion Tour.” Before setting out, the tourists are strictly warned that they must not do anything to disrupt history. Specifically, when the crowd is asked whether Jesus or Barabbas should be spared, they must all join the call “Give us Barabbas!”. (A priest absolves them from any guilt for so doing). However, when the moment comes, the protagonist suddenly realizes that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is composed entirely of tourists from the future, and that no actual Jewish Jerusalemites of 33 AD are present at all.”
Have been in London for a couple of days. Highbury looking beautiful with blossom on all the trees and the daffodils in bloom. Arsenal football stadium is Amazing. Bicycles everywhere. Down the West End, China Town crammed with delivery vans in the morning and in Sloane Square an old woman feeds the pigeons while an ancient Harrods electric delivery van trundles past, the driver sporting a grey top hat.
Nic Fiddian-Green's horse head
An enormous horses head sculpture by Nic Fiddian-Green now stands at Marble Arch and walking back along Oxford Street I looked for the first time at the extravagant sculpture over the doors of Selfridges which seems based on a nautical motif. On Tottenham Court Road a queue formed for the new iPad2 at PC World.
Later, in the evening, the Cafe Oto in Dalston had some kind of music event underway but the bloke on the door wanted £12 so I declined and continued on to The Prince George which, to my delight, had Neil Young’s Words on the juke box.
On Saturday morning I noticed that the top of Charing Cross Road has been closed off for work on the London Underground. A lot of work going on there.
Nelson's Ship in a Bottle
In Trafalgar Square the Fourth Plinth currently supports a large ship in a bottle. At around 11am people gathered as for the anti-cuts demonstration and a group of women from the Association of Child Psychotherapists sort of put the cuts into perspective.
Further toward Victoria, in St James Park, the squirrels are practically tame and leap onto the railings to beg for food. Once they receive something they rush away to bury their little treasure in the flower beds.
I’ve lived in Brighton for around ten years and for all that time the West Pier Trust has been twittering on about rebuilding the West Pier. The trust was established in 1978 and in all that time they appear to have achieved nothing.
Even after the superstructure of the pier was utterly destroyed in two fires in 2003 the Trust claimed that the infrastructure was still intact and that restoration would go ahead. However, despite the trusts interminable deliberations, despite its studies, web sites and marketing material the pier continued to deteriorate until in 2011 the soul useful purpose of the West Pier is to provide a muse for local photographers.
Since the pier is dead one might expect that the trust would make the remains safe, tidy up the foreshore and run itself down but that is not how bureaucracies work.
The West Pier Trust has a new idea. It is going to build a new “world-beating landmark”. An enormous spire with a viewing platform which goes up and down. The marketing material looks pretty good though one wonders if the trust will be any more successful at building this than it was at restoring the old West Pier.
Last year I attended a course on a Project Management framework known as PRINCE2. One of the aspects that was hammered home in this course was that one must continue to justify the project in terms of its stated objectives. If risks or issues occur then the project manager must go back to the executive and report that there may be a risk that the project cannot meet its objectives. The reason for this is that the decision to stop the project does not lie with the day to day management but with the project sponsor. The decision lies with the person or body who initiated and set in place the reason for the project.
It seems to me that the West Pier Trust have failed miserably in their management of restoration of the West Pier. Not only have they failed to restore the pier but they have invented a new objective for themselves once it became apparent that the original objective could not be met.
This probably sounds very dry and irrelevant but look at it like this. Suppose you saved up your pennies and decided to build an extension to your house. Suppose that the project manager who you engaged spent most of his time on presentations and web sites and then came back to you years later and told you that he had failed to build the extension but had built a fantastic swimming pool.
I believe that the Wets Pier Trust is a classic example of a self sustaining publicly funded bureaucracy. Even when its raison d’etre is removed the executives cannot bring themselves to dissolve the trust and go home. Even as the gutted ruins crumbled into the sea and as late 2007 the trust continued to proclaim their mantra that they would rebuild it. I would have loved to to attend the meeting where the staff of the trust finally acknowledged that the West Pier would never be rebuilt and then scrambled around for something to spend the money on and some way to keep themselves in jobs. One wonders what will happen once the viewing tower is completed? Will the West Pier Trust discover some other vital role it needs to fulfil? I have no doubt that they will surprisingly discover that managing the new structure takes the same if not more staff and a budget which seems to increase year on year.
Personally I am in favour of letting the the sea to take the bones of the West Pier and for the trust to die along with it.
As I was in the area, today, I thought I’d drop in to the Asda in Brighton Marina. Big mistake. Whoever owns Brighton Marina has been steadily building more and more shops and flats. As the Marina is artificial it only has one access road which runs down a sort of flyover. Add to this the way that the Asda car park entrance runs around a bend so that you cannot see the mass of traffic before you until it’s too late and you’ve joined the queue for the car park. I queued patiently and parked. When I emerged it took me 45 minutes just to get out of the car park.
All this is, of course, ghastly but it made me wonder about the new development which was being planned for Brighton Marina which, according to some reports, could include 1,280 new apartments.
It makes me wonder what our city council is thinking of. What possible sway could large rich developers have over city councillors? It beats me.
This is a video by some guys called The Love Police who are highlighting the increasing restrictions on individuals in public/private spaces. e.g. the way the police claim powers which they do not possess to stop filming.
An exhausted traveller arrives in Prague on a bitterly cold winter’s night and finds himself several miles from his hotel. He trudges through the snow toward the hotel while an eerie bell tolls portending he knows not what.
When the stranger finally reaches his hotel he accidentally gets out of the elevator on the wrong floor and is met by a disturbing doppelgänger version of reality haunted by sinister manikins. After retreating back to the elevator he finally reaches his room and, thankfully, TV.
Last week I was in Prague. It was cold and snowy when I arrived yet my taxi took me straight to the Crown Plaza Castle Hotel without hindrance. The Crown Plaza appears to be a refurbished monastery. All the monks have been thrown out and replaced with smart and efficient concierges and barmen. As I entered there was a reception desk to my left and a bar to my right. A difficult decision following a cramped flight.
The hotel is low rise so the view from my room is somewhat limited but if one wanders around in the snow for a bit one approaches the Bella Vista Restaurant with a fantastic view over Prague.
My favourite aspect of the hotel is the lift with two separate versions of each floor. On arrival I mistakenly pressed the button for the “wrong” 1st floor where I wandered around in what appeared to be a perfectly normal hotel corridor though it felt eerie and disturbing and I could not find my room.
I retreated to the lift and pressed the “other” 1st floor button. Though I had the sensation of movement, I can’t be sure whether it was up or down. Indeed I am not sure that we moved in any physical plane at all and I fleetingly imagined that perhaps three dimensional space had somehow become twisted like a Mobius strip.
The doors opened and I was presented with a doppelgänger version of the same floor only this time it felt warm and welcoming and I quickly found my room. As I pressed the door closed behind me it produced a loud resonant thud as if someone else had simultaneously slammed a similar door on the other side of the hotel. As I glanced out the window I thought I saw the curtains moved in the room of the opposite. I did not go out again that evening.
The next day, in the office, I connected to my email to find my inbox stuffed full with messages of doom from the personnel department in the UK. It seems that it had snowed in England. On Tuesday my colleagues in England had left the office in the middle of the afternoon due to “exceptional weather conditions” and on Wednesday they all pissed off after lunch. By Thursday nobody was even trying to go to work.
Meanwhile, in Prague, it began snowing on Tuesday and snowed heavily and persistently all day Wednesday. Yet the traffic continues to move freely and I was forced to remain at my desk. Damn these efficient Europeans.
On Tuesday evening I ate at a traditional Czech restaurant. By traditional I mean that we ate traditional pork with dumplings and an excellent Czech lager. Very good. I am not certain whether the jovial and sarcastic waitress was traditional or that the constant greetings in numerous European languages was in any way a feature of Prague life. The meal over, we hit upon the idea of sampling a selection of Czech spirits. Plum, Apricot and Grape were the last I recall before staggering off up the hill back to the Castle to meander the disturbing “other” floors.
The temperature in the mornings was down to a mere -8. I say “mere” as I am aware of the appalling “exceptional weather conditions” being suffered by my colleagues in the UK. I had been warned of the cold and so had wrapped myself in several layers finished off with a thick woollen scarf and heavy overcoat. As I emerged from the warmth of the Castle I felt the tang of the cold hit me for up to a second before I was enclosed in the warmth of the taxi. As the taxi rumbled toward my destination I noted that the driver wore jeans and a light shirt and had the heating on full. I became aware that, were I completely naked, the temperature in the car would still be extremely hot and stifling and I speculated weather the driver might be some kind of masochistic sauna fanatic. The driver, unaware of my distress, muttered continually into either his radio amidst burst of static. He seemed unsure of the location of my destination and, I dare say deliberately, missed the location at least twice as he drove back and forth along Bavorska. By the time we arrived I was glad to emerge into the cold air and threw him a bundle of notes. As he left I thought I heard manic laughter above the slow heavy roar of the wind and wondered if the driver might be from one of the mysterious “other” floors.
I should not have complained of the heat. Wednesday evening I climbed into a taxi which joined the long queues of snowbound traffic and headed for the Crown Plaza. An hour later I realised we were heading for the “wrong” Crown Plaza and I instructed the operative to alter his course. As the vehicle laboured up the steep and slippery inclines we encountered more and more traffic. After remaining stationary for 10 minutes while watching a rabble of urchins pushing and shoving at the cars in front I realised that these Europeans would achieve nothing and what was needed was English pragmatism.
Prague Tram
Leaving my laptop in the taxi I trudged up the street and helped push first one and then a second car out into the road. The third spun it’s wheels wildly and skewed back and forth across the road before careering out into the slow moving traffic.
My driver skidded to a stop beside me, I fell into the taxi and we continued our journey. After another half an hour the driver declared that he could go no further. I handed over far too much money, buttoned my overcoat and left the comparative safety of the taxi. The snow was heavy and continuous and I was swiftly caked with the stuff. “Carry on to the end and then turn right and follow the tram” the driver had said. I turned right and walked hoping that this was not some sick European humour.
After perhaps half an hour I was becoming disorientated and did not know whether I was walking toward the hotel or away from it. I considered whether to press on or turn back. But turn back to where? I continued on the path set by the taxi driver and wondered whether I would be found the next morning curled up beneath a bush, stiff as a board. It would not be the first time though this time presumably would be the last.
Gradually the parkland surrounding me gave way to buildings and in a flash of recognition I realised that I had reached the corner of Keplerova and Pohorelec; I was almost back at the hotel. There is a little shop on Pohorelec so I stopped and bought a carton of chocolate milk and some paprika crisps and continued to the Crown Plaza Castle where I changed and went down to dinner, wading through a sea of Japanese tourists on my way. Before I returned to my room I stepped outside for a moment. The snow still fell heavily and the cold was becoming intense. The forecast for the next day was -22C.
Bar food in Prague
On Thursday evening I ate at a little bar and restaurant down the hill from the hotel on Diskařská as it joins Dlabacov. One thing about Europeans is there bar food is good. A sausage with a little cabbage and some bread went down very well with a glass of red wine.
Arriving back at Heathrow on Friday afternoon I was prepared for the worst but on reaching my car I found it had approximately two centimetres of snow covering it. The M25 was clear of snow and traffic and I my journey was quicker than usual probably because the whole of England had remained in bed on Friday.
Photography
Mass tourism – scourge of the urban environment
Tags: Berlin, buses, commercialisation, Garry Kilworth Let’s Go to Golgotha, globalisation, Help the Tourists are Coming, land, london, London Development Agency, market forces, private property, property is theft, protest, public space, the commons, Tourism, tourists, Tragedy Of The Commons, Travel, urban environment
Tourism
The people of Berlin are protesting about the large number of tourists who visit their city and I have every sympathy.
Mass tourism is a scourge on society. The enormous buses clog our streets obscuring the very views that the tourists have come to see and eventually the local culture is displaced by an international tourist culture of burgers, beer and bullshit. Local charm is replaced by shops selling plastic beefeaters and pictures of how things used to be before mass tourism.
We all love to travel and from the tourists point of view mass tourism is a boon enabling us to see the world. Without mass tourism many of us would have no experience of anything outside our immediate vicinity.
But mass tourism destroys the thing it loves. A herd of tourists cannot visit a city without damaging it like some socio-economic version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
When a person reads of the Left Bank in Paris he learns of Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway. He thinks that he too must experience this seminal environment and he buys his ticket. But the locals have seen him coming. They know that the age of art has passed and the age of commerce is upon us. So they open themed cafés, bars and restaurants with names like Bar Les Artistes or Le Lucernaire.
When our gallant traveller arrives he finds that he is not rubbing shoulders with writers or poets but engaged in a drinking competitions with a IT Administrator from Milton Keynes. Our intellectual explorer is now in the minority. The majority of the clientele are not interested in culture but feel they should “take a look while we’re here”. They have been sold culture in the same way that they are sold breakfast cereal and aftershave.
Our cities become caricatures of themselves, Ko Samui becomes Blackpool and an Indian tourists sits and enjoys the ambiance of Paris while eating a Big Mac.
The tourist industry markets travel as a liberating experience but mass tourism is not so much a manifestation of freedom as of greed, globalisation and hyper-commercialisation.
The population of Greater London is estimated at approximately 7.7 Million people. Wikipedia considers that London receives 15 million tourists each year and it is a safe bet that the vast majority of these concentrate their activity in central London. At the moment, the tourist industry sees no limits on how many people it can push down the subway at Oxford Circus. This has been detrimental to the quality of life of Londoners and no doubt Berliners suffer similarly and so are right to object.
Industry and commerce have long involved the appropriation of commonly held land for exploitation by self appointed “owners”. Communism recognises this when it declares that “property is theft”. We generally consider this property to be land used for homes, farms or factories and we assume that this confiscation means exclusion of the public but we neglect the public space in between private property. We neglect the commons.
This common space is owned, used and valued by all of us yet government and commerce now seem hell bent on exploiting it to herd around disinterested tourists in such wretched conditions that their goal, once they emerge from their air-conditioned packaging, is to take a piss, grab a burger and get back on the bus.
The scourge of mass tourism is as an example of The Tragedy Of The Commons (TTOTC).
The Tragedy Of The Commons may sound like a Thomas Hardy novel but is, in fact, a concept used by economists. To quote Wikipedia: “The tragedy of the commons is a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.”
The scenario usually given is where common land is used by multiple individuals to graze their cattle. It is in the interest of each individual to graze as many cows as possible yet this will eventually ruin the grazing land to the detriment of all.
One solution often proposed is that the commons should be privatised and access restricted to those with the ability to pay. The owner would then work in his own self interest to ensure that the asset was maintained in good condition. This could mean that the owner would limit access but this is, by no means, certain.
Intuitively I am against the continued expansion of the private sphere and I find modern shopping malls a poor replacement for a thriving high street.
Another way of addressing TTOTC is intervention by local government. Legislation could be implemented to limit use and protect the asset. In the case of mass tourism this might mean metropolitan rules restricting the number of Bulk Tourist Deliveries (BTDs) in a given period.
However, local government derives a lot of revenue from allowing companies to graze their tourists in city streets and officials often see their role as maximising revenue. According to Wikipedia “The Government Office for London states that tourism revenues constitute 10 per cent of London’s gross value added and contributes to the employment of up to 13 per cent of London’s workforce. According to the London Development Agency, visitors to London spend around £15bn each year.”
Obviously cities will not wish to give up this revenue but at the moment we are sacrificing our environment for short term profit. Reversing this trend and protecting our cities will make them better places to live and ensure that they continue to attract tourists well into the future.
Many years ago, over too many pints, I recall discussing the idea of creating a tour operator which would specialise in giving tourists an authentic night out in London. We would offer a standard service tailored to the Japanese businessman and start with a few pints in a local boozer followed by a trip on a big red double decker bus down to Fitzrovia. More pints would be consumed and a Japanese man would be cajoled into thinking that his beer was off and pushed into taking it back to the bar. The barman would be bribed to take a sip, pause, frown and then apologise profusely before telling the Japanese businessman that he had a “very discerning pallet sir”. More beer would be consumed and the Japanese businessman encouraged to approach a specific young woman who would be bribed to slap him soundly around the face.
The frivolities would continue in an Indian Restaurant where large portions of Vindaloo would be consumed and the waiter paid to talk some bollocks about how this was the hottest curry ever consumed. Eventually the tourists would be emptied into taxis and left to find their own way home when hopefully a minority would vomit in the back of the cab and end the night sleeping in a railway station.
The company was to be called Here We Go Tours and we considered that visiting Australians would make the best tour guides.
The 20th century was the age of standardisation, the production line and economies of scale. The 21st century looks set to change all that. From Internet shopping to 3D printing, globalisation and technology are enabling consumers to customise their purchases to suit their tastes. House swaps and couch surfing are two examples of how independent travellers are using The Internet to bypass the mass tourism industry.
Why not go further, why not reject the standardised tours set by self appointed experts and design your own itinerary? In the past this may have been difficult but in the 21st century the tools are readily available. The Internet allows us to research an area, Google Street View lets us wander the streets before we get there and our GPS equipped smartphones allow us to navigate once we get there.
Why not create an itinerary and share it with your friends on Facebook?
The concept of tourists destroying what they visit is not new and was deftly described in a 1975 Science Fiction story by Garry Kilworth named “Let’s Go to Golgotha”. To quote Wikipedia: “In the future period where the story takes place, time travel has been invented and made commercially available. Among other historical events, tourists can book a time-travelling “Crucifixion Tour.” Before setting out, the tourists are strictly warned that they must not do anything to disrupt history. Specifically, when the crowd is asked whether Jesus or Barabbas should be spared, they must all join the call “Give us Barabbas!”. (A priest absolves them from any guilt for so doing). However, when the moment comes, the protagonist suddenly realizes that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is composed entirely of tourists from the future, and that no actual Jewish Jerusalemites of 33 AD are present at all.”