The 'Consuming' of Place

JOHN URRY

Wordsworth's The Brother 'signifies the beginning of modernity ... a time when one stops belonging to a culture and can only tour it'

(Buzard, 1993: 27)

'A view? Oh a view! How delightful a view is!'

(Miss Bartlett, in A Room with a View; Forster, 1955 [1908]: 8).

Sharon Macdonald recounts a common story she heard told on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. 'There was an old woman ... living in township X. One day a couple of tourists come by and start asking her questions.

"Have you ever been outside this village?" ...

"Well, yes. I was at my sisters in [neighbouring township]" ...

"But you've never been off the island?"

"Well, I have, though not often I suppose." "So, you've been to the mainland?" She nods. "So you found Inverness a big city then?" "Well, not so big as Paris, New York or Sydney, of course ..."'

(Macdonald, 1997: 155)

'Wow, that's so postcard' (visitor seeing Victoria Falls.

(Quoted in Osborne, 2000: 79).

Visual Consumption

For a decade or so I have been interested in how it is that visitors (and indeed local people) experience place. One way of formulating this is through the idea of Consuming Places (Urry, 1995), that visitors especially through a visual gaze or appropriation increasingly consume places. But what does this mean exactly, and what are the implications that places are visually consumed?

First, we should distinguish, loosely following Wordsworth, between land and landscape as distinct forms of belongingness to place (Milton, 1993). The former, land, involves conceptualising land as a physical, tangible resource that can be ploughed, sown, grazed and built upon. It is a place of work conceived functionally. As a tangible resource, land is bought and sold, inherited and especially left to children, either directly or through the rights established resulting from the use of land over lengthy periods of time. To dwell on a farm is to participate in a pattern of life where productive and unproductive activities resonate with each other and with very particular tracts of land, whose history and geography will often be known in intimate detail. There is a lack of distance between people and things.

The practice of land is quite different from that of landscape, with the latter entailing an intangible resource whose definitive feature is appearance or look (Milton, 1993). The notion of landscape emphasises leisure, relaxation and visual consumption by visitors. From the 18th century onwards a specialised visual sense developed – this was based upon the camera obscura, the claude glass, the use of guidebooks, the widespread knowledge of routes, the art of sketching, the balcony, photography and so on (Ousby, 1990). As a consequence of this specialised visual sense areas of wild, barren nature, once sources of sublime terror and fear, were transformed into what Raymond Williams terms 'scenery, landscape, image, fresh air', places waiting at a distance for visual consumption by those visiting from towns and cities of 'dark satanic mills' (1972: 160; Macnaghten & Urry, 1998). By 1844 Wordsworth was noting that the idea of landscape was only recently developed. So that by the mid-19th century houses were increasingly built with regard to their 'prospects' as though they were a kind of 'camera' (Abercrombie & Longhurst, 1998: 79). The language of views thus prescribed a particular visual structure to the very experience of place as land gave way to landscape (Green, 1990: 88). As Miss Bartlett declares in A Room with a View: 'A view? Oh a view! How delightful a view is!' (Forster, 1955 [1908]: 8).

Thus in the case of the English Lake District, there was a complex multi-layered making. A place of 'land', according to Daniel Defoe of inhospitable terror, came to be transformed into 'landscape', a place of beauty and desire (Urry, 1995). Similarly, even before the end of the 18th century the Alps had been regarded as mountains of immense inhospitality, ugliness and terror. But they too became 'civilised'. Ring describes how the Alps 'are not simply the Alps. They are a unique visual, cultural, geological and natural phenomenon, indissolubly wed to European history' (2000: 9). And also by the end of the 18th century the land of 'tropical nature' of the Caribbean had been romanticised by European travellers who began to see the scenery as though it were a 'painting', as landscape (Sheller, 2003). And there are diverse other examples of how places of land became places of visual desire, as the inhospitable was turned into landscape, especially for rich (male) European visitors.

Photography is central to this shift from land to landscape. Indeed tourism and photography could be said to commence in the 'west' in their modern form around 1840. Louis Daguerre and Fox Talbot announced their somewhat different 'inventions' of the camera, in 1839 and 1840. In 1841, Thomas Cook organised what is now regarded as the first packaged 'tour', the first railway hotel was opened in York just before the 1840s railway mania, the first national railway timetable, Bradshaws, appeared, Cunard started the first ever ocean steamship service, and Wells Fargo, the forerunner of American Express, began stagecoach services across the American west (Lash & Urry, 1994: 261). The year 1840 then is that moment when the 'tourist gaze' emerges, involving the combining together of the means of collective travel, the desire for travel, the techniques of photographic reproduction and the notion of landscape. As a visitor to Victoria Falls subsequently declared: 'Wow, that's so postcard' (quoted in Osborne, 2000: 79) as landscape rather than land is all the rage.

But while 1840 marks the beginning of the modern era in terms of landscape, of an endlessly devouring tourist...