ABSTRACT
The notion of the past as a ‘foreign country’ is derived from the title of David Lowenthal’s magisterial examination of the relationships between societies and their history (Lowenthal, 1985). Lowenthal’s purview extends well beyond the way in which people use the consumption of history to shape leisure practices, but the metaphor is especially apposite in examining the role of heritage attractions as contemporary spaces of tourism. As we have seen throughout this book, tourism is often essentially concerned with the exploration or experience of the ‘foreign’, but as the title of Lowenthal’s book reminds us, foreignness has a temporal as well as the more familiar spatial dimension. Hence the spaces that we explore as tourists are often those that represent versions of the past rather than the present, but which are still places in which we may derive and enjoy many of the experiences that we acquire through contemporary foreign travel – for example, the sense of the exotic, or of the familiar that is also subtly different.
