Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. This book is about the production, representation, consumption and (re)presentation of the British landscape. This appears to be a focus that has long captured the gaze of geographers. Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies attempts to embrace poststructuralist theory to engage with analyses of the construction of space, place and landscape in everyday life. Simultaneously, however, the book acknowledges the contribution of previous structuralist discourses to informing our understanding of landscape. The first half of the book attempts to contextualise leisure and tourism landscapes by problematising the interrelations between landscape, leisure and tourism and by situating a discussion of these relationships within the wider discourses of social and cultural geographies. The second half of the book then seeks to examine ways in which dominant notions of landscape have been both maintained and disrupted by different processes of consumption, reproduction and representation.