ABSTRACT
The removal of West European trade barriers, the dismantling of socialist political structures in Eastern Europe, and the ease of international travel have combined in the late twentieth century to produce the largest potential for tourism since wars and xenophobia shut down such freedoms some 70–100 years ago. Such radical changes have a marked effect on social and economic behaviour: witness the effect of the Napoleonic Wars, which put an end to the lengthy and uplifting Grand Tour. The curious energies of the educated and moneyed classes of Britain were, perforce, directed to the antiquities, arts and environment of their homelands. The Romantic Movement was born. Its legacy remains, forming part of the portmanteau concept of ‘heritage’. Today, pieces of the Berlin Wall, whose thirty-year life has given it an importance beyond any architectural wonderment, are also cocooned in that concept. The degradation of landscapes and of people has led politicians, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs to rescue the remains of nineteenth-century industrial exploitation in the USA and Europe and to give them new life as leisure components. Former concentration camps in Poland and Germany are being considered for rehabilitation through conversion to time-shares or holiday chalets: not too wildly different from the Paradors of Spain. Warships of timber or steel are rescued and, with concrete foundations, moored in ‘appropriate’ locations for the interest of tourists and with the purpose of gleaning cash. Whole townships in Germany and France (St Malo, for example) are rebuilt in their former style and street patterns. All is done in the name of ‘heritage’, which has an ancient and honourable pedigree as a component of the long-established tourism industry dating from the time of the Colossus of Rhodes, through the side-trips branching from the main purpose of the Crusades, the eighteenth-century indulgence of the Grand Tours, the earliest picture postcards of such artists as the brothers Buck, to air-lifted visits to the Taj Mahal, the Pueblo villages of New Mexico, the glories of St Petersburg and the steep byways of Mont St Michel on the Normandy coast.
