RURAL and COASTAL SUSTAINABLE TOURISM ISSUES: an Introduction to Rural and Coastal Zone

Geographies of Sport, Leisure and Tourism2011

RURAL AND COASTAL SUSTAINABLE TOURISM ISSUES: An Introduction to Rural and Coastal Zone Tourism and Recreation with particular reference to the Holderness and Lincolnshire coasts

Ian D. Rotherham

Aims of this Chapter

The intention is to introduce issues in relation to rural and coastal zone recreation, visiting and tourism, and to place these in a context of environmental, social and economic factors. It is worth dipping in to the wider literature about the history of seaside visiting and to read some of the literature (both academic and popular) on spas, health visiting and holidays. Much of this is easily available on the internet and a simple search should turn up useful and interesting articles. If you need further guidance then don’t hesitate to ask.

The chapter introduces some of the pertinent issues for rural and coastal zone visiting. It is worth searching the wider literature on the history of the region, the development of seaside tourism, and the current issues and challenges which face these areas with late twentieth century declines.

There is an extensive literature on seaside visiting and sustainable development, and you should certainly at least look at some of the writing on the adverse impacts of mass tourism on for example the Mediterranean shorelines.

The topics are much too big to be covered in detail here but it is hoped that you will search the wider literature to provide a context for the focus of this section.

Introduction and Overview

Beside the Seaside

Bear in mind that seaside visiting for any purpose is a relatively recent phenomenon; in Britain dating from the late 1700s and early 1800s. Before this time cleanliness was a largely unconsidered matter and indeed being dirty was deemed to be healthy. Blocked pores kept out the ‘miasma’ and its risk of infection, and any form of washing was approached with care and even fear. The idea of bathing or swimming in the sea would be totally outrageous and threatening to health. Furthermore, what coastal towns or settlements there were would be major ports and centres of business and commerce, or very poor fishing villages. Neither of these would be considered suitable for a refined visitor.

Seaside visiting stemmed from a number of key influences and its fortunes over time have varied as fashions have changed. Much of this is historical, but it is important to realise that you cannot hope to resolve contemporary problems without an understanding of the historical context. The first major influence on seaside visiting was the fashion for health-related holidays and visiting to first inland water spas, and then to seaside areas and coastal spas. In the early 1800s this rapidly transformed the idea of what was fashionable recreation for the wealthy and the middle classes. Furthermore, royal patronage of locations such as Weymouth (by King George III), and then Brighton (by the Prince Regent), changed forever the perceptions of the seaside. Transport was also improving and people were able to get to these locations in relative comfort by stage coach and along the new turnpike roads.

An understanding of these trends should be set in the changing ideas of what was acceptable and indeed fashionable in terms of a visitor destination. The impact of the Romantic Movement and the ideas of the picturesque were altering the way that the middle classes in particular viewed the countryside. Locations such as the Lake District, the Peak District, Snowdonia, and Scotland were becoming desirable places to visit. Previously they had been seen as frighteningly wild and potential evil abominations. The fashion of seaside visiting was wrapped up in this wider phenomenon. In is essential to realise that these earlier visitors did not see the landscape in the way that you and I do. Furthermore, the holiday resort and its hinterland did not exist then as it does today. Many of the locations were indeed remote and largely uncivilised in terms of the available facilities for eating, staying or recreating. However, there was a further and important underlying driver for this interest in the seaside. Again it is important to turn the clock back to a time before modern medicine and even prior to any understanding of diseases. People lived in constant fear of very nasty diseases and infections and the growth of larger towns and cities, mostly without any effective sanitation, was leading to appalling levels of pollution and associated disease. In most cases there was little hope of either effective diagnosis and even less of any treatment or cure. Bronchial and intestinal or gastric infections killed thousands. Many sufferers of problems such as tuberculosis were desperate for an ease to their suffering or better still, for a cure. Health-giving seaside air and the therapeutic effects of seawater were touted widely as cures for these problems. So here we have the other major driver for a change in the fashionability of these locations and the beginning of the great upsurge in popularity of the seaside resort.

Another factor which encouraged the growth of ‘domestic’ tourism in the UK was the long-running series of wars in Europe following the French Revolution. This made the then fashionable ‘Grand Tour’ both difficult and dangerous, and in so doing, turned attentions to inward-bound destinations.

The final two great influences on seaside visiting were the development of the first effective mass transportation systems with the steam railways of the mid to late 1800s. Railway lines extended to a whole series of increasingly popular resorts and destinations to bring huge numbers of visitors from the rapidly expanding industrial cities. The waves of fashionability and the interests of first upper class discerning visitors, then mobile, wealthy middle classes, and then finally the lower middle classes and working classes, determined the success and the growth of the destinations. As subsequent waves arrived the preceding and more discerning might move to less accessible resorts. The growth of the great industrial cities and the need to provide holidays for the masses of workers were the final drivers for this growth in the seaside resort. The famous ‘works weeks’ when whole industries closed down for annual maintenance and refurbishment, and entire communities decanted to a limited number of favoured resorts, are one of the most notable aspects of this development. The seaside ‘bed-and-breakfast’ accommodation and their famous or infamous landladies are one of the most powerful images of this movement which developed from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Alongside this was the emergence in post-1940s Britain of the ‘holiday camp’, again catering for the masses.

Since the 1950s, the main influences have been competition with overseas destinations and cheap flights making such holidays accessible to all, and the advent of mass ownership of the motorcar. There are other demographic trends which you need to consider and to be aware of such as the development of seaside resorts as retirement destinations. People often have retired to locations which they visited for their holidays when younger. Combined with the seasonality of many remaining holiday resorts, often squeezed into a few weeks and Easter and then six to eight weeks in the summer, meets that for much of the year these places largely shut down and become ghosts towns of the retired and the unemployed. The consequent problems are some of those which are the wider context for this chapter.

Countryside Visiting

First of all it is important to realise that much countryside is close to the sea and indeed much rural visiting occurs from seaside resorts. We can’t therefore easily separate the two phenomena.Rather like thecoastal resort,countryside visiting grew from an interest in health and in the picturesque and it followed similar trends to those described earlier. Much of the early tourist trade was centred on health spas and baths such as at Buxton and Matlock in the Peak District, or Harrogate in North Yorkshire. This meshed with itineraries of famous beauty spots and ‘picturesque’ locations that were to be visited by the refined and the educated.Small market towns were often favoured but with a huge number of spas, baths, and ancient or historic locations. Further stimulation came from the writing of key people such as Sir Walter Scott and the consequent fashion of visiting the locations for his books and poems. To a large degree this type of visiting avoided the worst (or best?) excesses of mass tourism which affected some seaside resorts.Some locations, such as for example Matlock Bath, have acquired some of the mass tourism trappings of cheap gift shops and Bank Holiday motorcycle rallies, but most have remained relatively specialised in their clientele.

Indeed many rural destinations have until relatively recently remained reasonably intact as functioning rural communities with all the trappings of village life or of a thriving market town. However, in the last twenty years this has changed with firstly the mechanisation sand simplification of much of the farming industry which has meant fewer people employed locally. With this trend the rural community has often silently slipped away to the bigger towns and to the cities. Then, in recent years, the collapse of much of the faming sector has meant the loss of the economy which bound the remaining communities together. Many farming families are leaving the industry and the haemorrhaging of young people from the countryside has continued unabated.

With the loss of the traditional communities which were tied very much to the land, have come tow other counter-trends. The first of these has been the development of villages and even farms as dormitory settlements for the wealthy middle classes of nearby cities, and the use of the same for either second homes or holiday residences. There are huge implications of al these changes in terms of ‘community’, for landscape management, and with economic competition for dwellings between indigenous people and the wealthy incomers. It is against this wider backcloth that ideas of diversification and of rural visiting and tourism must be considered. Out of ‘season’, like many seaside locations, rural villages are sometimes almost completely dead. Yet not all this change can be attributed to the tourist; since there is an inexorable move from rural to urban dwelling across the whole of the UK and indeed across much of Europe. Today, the vital local services such as a post office, a pub, or a village shop may depend for their survival on the spending power of visitors.

There is a further difference between the coastal resort and the rural destination, and again this is not a definitive separation. Much of the impact of visitors to the countryside is primarily from ‘day visitors’ and not tourists per se. Some of these visitors are serious outdoor enthusiasts who are pursuing a hobby such as mountaineering, cycling, bird-watching, or walking; the so-called countryside recreational visitors. Others are bound for the outdoors shops, the pub or the coffee shop. It is useful to understand a little of the way in which the rural visitor has developed and evolved.

The Growth of Countryside Visiting

Day visits to the countryside for recreation grew from the 1800s onwards. As towns and cities developed access to open space became something to be cherished and for which time had to be set aside and transportation obtained. Prior to this time there would have been the use of local open space for recreation, for fairs and for other celebrations. However, actual travel to a rural location for recreation would have been restricted to the relatively wealthy and leisured upper classes and lower gentry who pursued their interests in the hunt.

In terms of the development of countryside recreation as we might recognise it today, then we have to look to the growth of the northern towns and cities for our inspiration. Here amid the squalor and pollution, on the one day a week assigned to rest, the workers sought their recreation amongst the hills and moors of the surrounding lands and especially the Pennines. The consequent struggles between gamekeepers and landowners on the one hand, and the local workers and would-be ramblers on the other, are legendary. Indeed the access movement has only recently achieved its goals of unfettered rights of access to unenclosed lands. Historically though much of the now enclosed farmland and forestry plantation was unenclosed common land and had a general right of access for all. It was this right so deftly removed by the Parliamentary enclosures of the 1700s and 1800s, which lay behind most of the struggles for access. However, it was from these beginnings that the ramblers’ movement and the idea of outdoor leisure came about and grew through the early to mid 1900s. Travel to the sites was by foot, by bicycle, by bus or by train and it was a popular mass activity.

Developments during the 1920s and 1930s came to fruition in the late 1940s with the 1949 National Parks and Access to Countryside Act. This established the structures behind all the later governmental conservation agencies, and importantly set up the powers for the first National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Local Nature Reserves and National Nature Reserves. Further legislation in the 1960s established the powers to set up CountryParks and ForestParks, and then in the 1970s, Countryside Management Services.

From this point onwards the idea of day visits to a countryside site with suitable facilities, interpretation and often with specialist support, became increasingly a normal and popular activity. The people taking part and the impacts on local communities and the environment would now begin to be affected by two other insidious changes within society. The first was the demise of many rural railway services and then the removal of the lines themselves. To find out more about this, search for information on Thomas Beeching. The second change was the rise in car ownership from the very low numbers of the 1950s to the situation today where most families possess at least one vehicle.

One unexpected benefit of the 1960s closures has been the growth and opportunities provided for long and medium-distance walking, cycling and riding routes. For examples of these try a search for the Camel Trail in Cornwall, and the Monsal Trail in the Peak District.

Caravanning and Camping

Two other activities have grown dramatically since the 1940s and these are caravanning and camping. Both have had a major impact on both countryside visiting and on coastal zone tourism. They each contribute to positive economic impacts of visiting rural or coastal destination but uncontrolled they have altered dramatically some of the destinations. In dong this they have in some cases transformed a location and often have driven away both locals and other types of visitor. This has been an issue for some of the major east coast tourism destinations which have thus acquired a rather downmarket and tatty image as the lower rung of the tourism ladder.

Who are the Visitors?

A starting point for any assessment of a tourism or countryside recreation destination or attraction is to find out who currently visits and also how the profile of visitors might be grown in the future. A mistake on this, especially if too optimistic, can have catastrophic consequences for viability.

Not only is it important to know who the visitors are or might be, but also when they visit both during the seven days of the week and across the seasons, is essential information. Many attractions and facilities have the problems of a ‘boom and bust’ situation. When they are busy they are very busy; but when they are not, they are deserted. This can create serious difficulties in providing a service and a resource during the quiet times. Some destinations can also be very vulnerable to vagaries of the weather.