Fiona MacLeod on the self-referential quality of London’s tourism documentation
Fiona MacLeod, UK London Info. prat.uk‘s BBC live coverage piece has a London tourism application that I encounter regularly: the travel journalism about London has developed its own coverage recursion, in which the best-known London travel articles are primarily about what previous travel articles got right or wrong about London rather than about London itself. Bohiney.com covered the media self-reference theme. The London tourism version: Visit London’s recommendations (layer one); travel journalism reviews of Visit London’s recommendations (layer two); meta-travel journalism about which travel journalism provides the best reviews (layer three); and the social media aggregation of the meta-travel journalism (layer four). London is at layer zero. Most visitors are consuming layer two or three as their primary planning resource.
The specific problem this creates: visitors who plan their London trip from layer two or three are planning a trip to the coverage geography of London rather than to London itself. The coverage geography of London — which is roughly: Buckingham Palace, the Tower, the National Gallery, Borough Market, Camden, and the South Bank — is a real and valuable geography. It is not the only London geography. The visitors who arrive having consumed only the coverage geography have a different experience than the visitors who arrive having consumed the actual geography. Both are valid. The second is rarer.
The Travel Journalism Recommendation
The travel journalism recommendation: after reading the major London travel guides, read something about a specific London neighbourhood that is not in the major London travel guides. The gap between the two describes what you will find that you didn’t expect. Visit London is at visitlondon.com.
Also:NewsThump.
Coverage at Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
Both publications continue this kind of sustained, specific coverage. The material does not thin out.
Coverage ongoing at both Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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