Lies of the Land

Counter-tourism and its tactics originate from the principles of mythogeography – a way of understanding the world and acting in it that privileges space and place above all else. So, it’s not surprising that counter-tourism is similarly biased. When in doubt, it looks to the place to provide the answers. Before this Handbookmoves on to the second and third stages of counter-tourism –interventions andopen infiltrations – here are a few ruminations on the productive roles of place and space in counter-tourism.

Bed

Close to the centre of Plymouth, a dried-up, fake, miniature canal runs between palms, stone lions and ruined chessboards – part of the excess of post-war regeneration – like an abandoned archaeological excavation of a civilisation that never existed. If you are willing to find your way around a few walls, you’ll find unreal places everywhere – the road to nowhere at the plague village of Eyam in Derbyshire; Tyneham: “the village that died for England”; Chicago: a fake Palestinian town in the Negev Desert used by the Israeli army; Willoughby: a railroad stop in the First Series ofThe Twilight Zone.

On the square

Look out for the symbols of Freemasonry (block, plumbline, set square, compasses, twin pillars, chequerboard). In English towns they are a blessed relief from the commercial banalities of cloned High Streets. Rejoice in their everyday esotericism (mostly ignored and, when noticed, suspected).

Big Flame

There is a conspiracy-narrative concerning events during the Second World War that occurred on a stretch of deserted pebble beach called Shingle Street on the east coast of England. The story wobbles between a secret, large-scale German invasion, a small incursive German force and some sort of local Allied exercise; whichever it is, the denouement of the tale is always the wholesale incineration of those involved by ignited gas pumped into the sea in hidden pipes, consuming everything in a bubbling ocean of flame.

A few miles away, at the Woodbridge RAF base, an immense runway was constructed during the war for the use of aircraft in difficulty, damaged in raids over continental Europe, returning under the less-than-full control of their crews. In the event of mist or fog adding to a pilot’s difficulties, FIDO (Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation) was triggered and, to burn off the miasma, sheets of flame from the vapours of petrol pumped at a rate of 100,000 gallons per hour were thrown up around the runway.

While both stories are intriguing, which is the most _____________ (insert your o