In a Liverpool shopping centre, there’s an upside-down house – a two-storey house that looks like it fell out of a Pixar film, but upside down. Its website promises that it is “designed to amuse and challenge visitors’ perceptions of space and gravity, leaving customers questioning their judgement”. After paying £7 to take some photos where it looks like you’re in a house (but upside down), you can at least expect that last promise to be fulfilled.
Recently, I got stuck behind some tourists meandering towards it. It was a Saturday morning, early in the school holidays, and it was busy. I’m not sure what it was that gave these four Americans away – the clompy tennis shoes and polo shirt tucked into belted shorts invited a wild stab – but it was obvious they were new in town, fresh from the cruise ship buffet and ready to noodle around to their hearts’ content. They stopped to look at the upside-down house.
“Some kinda… upside-down house,” one of them said in a Southern croak.
“How cuuuute,” said another.
I wanted to turn them 180 degrees and point them back at their liner. It’s not cute. It’s a load of old guff. We’ve got genuinely good stuff in Liverpool, stuff that’s not upside down. Don’t fancy that? Off to Madeira with you.
They were not the only day trippers in town though. Nearby, a queue of about 30 people deep had formed to take pictures in front of the massive letters spelling LIVERPOOL. The Albert Docks were heaving, the Beatles’ statue at Pier Head even more so. A small clique of international high-fashion types organised a photoshoot with the Three Graces as a backdrop.
This summer, tourists are everywhere, especially at home in London. Even near me in Turnpike Lane – which I don’t think Lonely Planet has ever pitched as a must-see destination – you’ll often see families with massive suitcases fiddling with Airbnb lockboxes. It’s easy to mock them: their gigantic backpacks, chest-straps trussed up tight, worn while standing just inside the door of a rapidly filling Tube carriage; their guileless staring at town centre maps; their general air of bafflement. It’s easy to resent them, too. They look daft, and they get in the way, and if you try to get round them, they panic and get even more in the way.
This tourist deluge isn’t just a feeling – the stats back it up. Last year saw 41.2 million visits to the UK, the most ever recorded, and together those tourists spent a record £31.5bn while they were here. And according to Visit Britain’s forecasts, this summer will be another record-breaker: 43.4 million visits, and £33.7bn spent. Even more remarkably, the UN’s data says we’ve overtaken France and Italy for international tourism receipts. Other reports are more doomy, generally en route to a call for various levy and tax cuts. Yet our tourism sector is, however you slice it, a huge win.
It’s also very much at odds with how we feel about ourselves right now. We’ve never been more popular with the rest of the world. Yet the idea that the UK is finished as a serious country has taken root in right-wing circles.
The catastrophising and miserablism is widespread. But it’s not the whole truth. Could things be better? Yes. Could they be worse? Oh boy, could they ever. Britain’s tourism boom is proof of that.
Flip through guide books from the 1980s and 1990s and you get a pretty tweedy picture of Britain. If you’ve time, dig out the 1986 edition of Explore Britain: 1001 Places to Visit to get a sense of what we used to present to the world. It’s page after page of unutterable tedium. I don’t want to slag off the Rutland County Museum in Oakham, for instance, but the prospect of a “fascinating collection of Rutland bygones including trade tools, farm wagons and agricultural implements” isn’t going to get many people on a plane at JFK.
But tourism has changed, and it turns out the UK is incredibly well suited to the vibes-based experience visitors want. From the Isle of Skye to Durdle Door, from Northern Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way to Northumberland’s castle-studded coast, we’re very Instagrammable and pretty easy to get around. And most importantly, in the past 30 years we’ve learned to turn our history and pop culture into something the world wanted to buy.
We don’t sell cotton and ships these days; we sell Harry Potter and Bridgerton and the Premier League. And we’re going bigger: Universal Studios Great Britain is slated to open in Bedfordshire in 2031, with James Bond, Paddington and Lord of the Rings as possible tentpoles. As the workshop of the world closed, the gift shop of the world opened.
We do big events well, too: in 2019, 18 per cent of all visits to the north-west included a trip to watch football, mostly at Old Trafford and Anfield; and huge gigs like Oasis, Blackpink and Dua Lipa this summer, or Taylor Swift last year, draw in people from all over the world.
Our food is good. Our cities are walkable. Our pop culture is legendary. Our landscapes are beautiful. Our climate is (for the time being) basically fine, heatwaves excepted. It’s expensive, but people still want to spend their hard-earned hols in Britain.
Yet for some reason, there’s still some reticence to accept this is something we do well, and a squeamishness about consciously trying to take tourists’ money.
But this is who we are now. The UK is prime tourist real estate. If it feels slightly galling to think of our home as a theme park for well-to-do retirees to shuffle round, think of it another way: people from all over the world spend years of savings and travel thousands of miles to get a brief glimpse of what we have here. It’s not demeaning – it’s a huge compliment.
We’ve managed to show off the best bits of our national life to the world – music, art, history, nature, sport – and we’ve done it without making any of them demonstrably worse.
If tourists turn up expecting to walk onto the set of My Oxford Year, they’ll probably be disappointed. But there is more to Britain than grousing about bin collections, arguments about mansion taxes, and a vague sense that things were better back in the day. It’s not perfect. But it’s all ours. And we could all stand to see ourselves like tourists do, from time to time.