The trouble with tourism
Philip Norman
Anyone who maintains that we must welcome tourists, for they come to share our heritage and history, should have seen the Bedouin woman I met last week in Edgware Road, occupying her release from purdah in some Paddington hotel-hovel by struggling along, burdened on all sides by so many enormous carrier bags that she seemed, in the stiff wind, like a plump black skittle about td become airborne under a Zeppellin labelled Marks and Spencer.
Each summer, despite fluctuating currencies, the tourist nuisance in London grows worse, and each summer the English Tourist Board and its toadies emit the same fatuous claim that London is enriched thereby. The benefit, doubtless comprehensible to those unsavoury gentlemen who purvey rancid-smelling 'hot dogs' at 11.50 each, is less so to those of us forced to contend with Belsen-like conditions on the Underground; with traffic rendered immovable by Continental coaches; with pavements clotted to a standstill and poisoned by the variegated odour – chiefly chip fat and cheap leather – of people being ripped off by the tens of thousands.
The garbage question alone is becoming ludicrous. I myself live in one of those unlucky houses, in the PaddingtonBayswater area, which have become gradually shut in by opportunist hotels with names such as 'The Imperial Hyde Park Court' and 'The Royal Elizabeth International', belying their limited amenities. In front of our terrace runs a 'service road' now permanently blocked by Dutch and German tour buses and steeped in the rubbish cast off by excited guests. The Scandinavian races, despite their reputation for neatness and hygiene, prove to be by far the filthiest. This district is noted also for its minor sheikhs. occupying numerous ground floor encampments. Each night, as dusk falls, the Brut after-shave lotion blooms like a pestilence. Lines of figures stand between the plane trees, contentedly urinating.
The claim most commonly made in defence of uncontrolled tourism is that it 'creates jobs'. So it undoubtedly does – but for whom? True, in the case of the Spanish Costa Brava, large quantities of rural peasants – not to mention inexperienced hotelbuilders – were provided by tourism with a prosperity they had never formerly known. A parallel instance would occur in England if thousands of Germans, Japanese and Arabs were persuaded to holiday on Merseyside and the Runcorn and Wigan hinterland. In London the sole consequence of tourism is a vast labyrinth of superfluous and substandard enterprise – charlatan restaurants, open-air kebab kiosks and, not least, those ingeniously-titled 'banks' and 'bureaux de change'. One could excuse the whole reeking bazaar were it to be proved to have made the slightest dint on the unemployment figures. But, of course, it does not: the labour, like the custom, is imported.
One feels, admittedly, a certain sympathy for the tourists as they descend from their air-conditioned coaches to behold The Royal Hyde Park Elizabeth International Hotel' in all its anticlimactic unsplendour. The trouble with tourism today is that, while you can fly to a country cheaply enough, to subsist there involves a struggle virtually on the breadline. Tourists, espe,cially in London, are the new refugees, the 'plane people', shambling around the parks in huge, purposeless groups, accompanied by the dull scrape of their own blue denim inside-legs.
Small wonder that their sole recourse is to plunder the shops and department stores of all those (mainly imported) goods which, in French or Latin American terms, still seem ludicrously cheap. Each day as I walk along Gloucester Terrace, another noted Bedouin quarter, the little human tents sit out on their new tin luggage, firmly signalling taxis not for hire, the veiled women clutching tins of Quality Street to sustain them through their desert-encompassed isolation. The truly successful English holiday, I am told, belongs to those tourists who succeed in breaking an arm or a leg and who, after weeks of intricate surgery and hospital care, are discharged with the stimulating assurance that there is absolutely nothing to pay.
The slightest suggestion of a tourist tax always throws the ETB and its satellites into apoplexy – but why? Such a tax, say £5 per head, would merely 'harmonise' with the payments arbitrarily demanded at many overseas airports. It would surely, even in government accountancy, do something to repair the depredations of tourists and their carrier bags on our stricken public transport system. I – and most of my beleaguered neighbours – would go further. If London is to become just another sordid funfair, let them at least build turnstiles.
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