SIR, — One and a half million tourists a year seems about
right for Britain. The places which tourists throng to in France and Italy become each year less trench and less Italian, less worth visiting, more like each other, and nastier to live in. Capri is now a snpermarket; and so, for that matter, is our own !Warwickshire) Broadway. If high-pressure tourism is essential for a country's solvency, fair enough: better for Southern Italy and Greece to become rivieras than for their wretched inhabitants to starve. But if a country can live reasonably well without excess tourism why sliculd it try to sell itself to more and more clients?
Of course tourism helps shop- and hotel-keepers; but in a Britain which has far too many shops and far too few good hotels it merely bolsters up the Malta quo.
A million extra tourists milling round the Tower. the Shakespeare country, Edinburgh el al. would surely make us more rather than less xenophobic, complacent, and insular? And would they really solve any of our economic problems?
21 Chepstow Place, W2
VICTOR GORDON
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