16 December

I want to talk about the ‘hollowing-out’ of towns, to give more context to my deep dislike of modern travel culture. This is Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Cotswolds, one of the most photographed towns in the UK. It has about 3,000 residents. Every year it’s swamped by between 300,000 and 500,000 tourists. Just look at the photo, it should disgust us. This has hollowed-out the town, meaning the town went from being an inhabited place, where work and schooling and shopping were focused on the needs of a local community, to now being an English countryside theme park. Residents actually say they feel like they’re living in a museum, most avoid the town altogether now, it’s been overrun. Basic things like postal services, pubs, shopping and schooling collapse, replaced by gift shops and pubs as visitor venues. I see many regional towns in Australia looking to tourism to save them from the decline of their original industries, like farming and mining. It will turn them into theme parks, where the most simple indicator of hollowing-out is that the town is mostly occupied by people whose commitment to place extends only as long as their stay i.e. nobody left there has any interest in the future of the location, only in its appeal as an image-venue during their stay. Many of these growing number of hollowed-out towns worldwide are also marked by the increasing ownership of housing and building there by people who don’t live there. Houses are converted to holiday homes, and AirBNBs, and ‘investment properties’. For now larger towns in the Central West are holding the line against hollowing-out, but I doubt they can without fundamental change to our cultural understanding of place. They’ll all become theme parks, and most will fail at that too. Tourists are easily bored, and move on to the next trending location. There for a fun time, not a long time. Geographical prostitution. If you think of yourself as a more ‘authentic’ traveller, answer me this: what’s your ongoing commitment to the places you’ve visited? Do you retain any connection to them at all, any interest in their ongoing survival? Or did you just get in, get the pics for the socials, the ’experiences’ for your personal growth and ‘bucket list’, and get out again?