ABSTRACT

For many years, I have lived in Greenwich, one of London’s most popular tourist destinations outside the centre of the city. About a year ago, an Argentinean café opened close to where I live, and well away from the tourist hotspots. This was unexpected, and I was eager to try it. When I did, I found not just very good Argentinean food, but many Argentinean customers, though I had not realized there was such a community in my neighbourhood. Globalization has meant not only more flows of more tourists around the world, but that the rest of the world increasingly flows to us as products, images and fellow residents – particularly in major cities like London (Franklin 2003). Yet much of the discussion and writing about tourism still sees it as a separate activity, undertaken for leisure purposes in ‘exotic’ resorts or well defined tourism districts in cities, and detached in time and space from everyday life and work. In this view, tourists are seen as comparatively passive consumers of a product that the city creates for them, exploiting whatever resources it can marshal.