Gardiner V., Matthews H. The changing geography of the United Kingdom
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
DAVID CROUCH
266
FIGURE 13.2 Heritage, shopping, club culture and ‘TV Tourism’ (examples cited in the text)
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION
267
them accessible to large numbers of people whilst at the same time protecting them from
overuse.
The wider ‘discovery’ of much less well-known sites has been significant too. Heritage
captures the interest of local enthusiasts and casual visitors as well as tourists at large. Old
canals provide new attractions and ‘open up’ new areas of city and countryside; for example,
inner Manchester and the Kennet and Avon canal across the Wiltshire and Berkshire
countryside in western England. Often the geography of these sites is shaped by their own
distinctive past, but some areas have been especially developed in areas of larger visitor
numbers. There are particular swathes of heritage sites extending from Hadrian’s Wall at
Penrith and the Lake District to the castles of the Northumberland coast. Areas of Wales,
Cornwall and Scotland have been newly promoted for leisure/tourism based on their
distinctive Celtic heritage.
A more temporary geography of leisure has been the creation and revival of numerous
festivals of the arts across Britain. Places such as Bath, Worcester, Bury St Edmunds and
Chester all offer ‘a cultural experience’ (Hewison 1987; Urry 1990). Many curious new
‘heritage’ places have been stimulated by television, literature and films set in locations that
become an important part of the content. Examples are Brideshead Revisited (Castle Howard),
Heartbeat in Yorkshire, Cookson Country in Northumberland and Lovejoy Country in Essex/
Suffolk. These are set in real places that become the object of imagined projection of heritage
(Figures 13.1 and 13.2).
Leisure as part of city-centre cultural revival
Heritage has contributed to the cultural interest of city centres for leisure use. The Globe
Theatre in London is an excellent example, where there is an ‘authentic’ link with history
and site, but the theatre itself has been completely rebuilt. Many cities have renovated their
castle areas and linked these with new leisure/tourism developments. The leisure geography
of many inner cities is one of dramatic restyling. Assisted by innovative urban landscaping
often geared to the youth market inner urban districts have experienced enormous renewal
and complete cultural change. This has often produced a new culture of clubs, music and
dance venues, restaurants, multiplex cinemas and a ‘café society’ where people can walk
and relax in a redesigned street. These include the examples of the old areas of Sheffield
(subject of the film The Full Monty), and Manchester’s ‘left bank’ (see Chapter 14). Such
change produces a night-time geography of leisure. In the daytime many of these areas are
largely quiet or the busy zone of office employees, until club-time arrives. The city has
become increasingly a leisure space for strolling, looking and being looked at, for display
and spectatorship (Fyfe 1998).
Another example of major city leisure that is both creating as well as celebrating
heritage is the Millennium Dome. This will add a new scale of leisure to the reshaping of
the inner East End (Figure 13.2). A much more temporary city geography emerges from the
revival of street events, most notably in the case of the annual multicultural celebration of
Netting Hill Carnival, when the whole life of the area of a square mile is joyfully disrupted
for a weekend. Centrally located parks have been reinvigorated with investment to encourage
the attraction of city areas for tourism, and leisure (Comedia 1995).
DAVID CROUCH
268
Micro-leisure and virtual leisure sites
A significant contrast to many of these key shifts in the changing geography of the UK
are the highly dispersed, individualised and domestic sites of virtual leisure provided
by computer games and the Internet. Instead of requiring large developments in particular
parts of the country or the city this leisure requires only a terminal and connections. In
an ironic combination, heritage and micro-leisure are connected in cyberspace. It is
possible to ‘visit’ Stonehenge, ‘see it’ from all angles, ‘walk round’ it, move inside it
with a cursor and mouse in cyberspace at the computer screen (Rojek 1995). There are
also new ‘transit’ leisure sites epitomised by the airport lounge and the motorway service
station. These are places where people punctuate journeys, make encounters and
anticipate being somewhere else.
Comprehending the new geography of leisure
Central to these shifts in the geography of leisure in the UK are aspects of what is called
‘consumption’. This is a term which is frequently applied to the consumer buying from a
producer. However it can mean more than this. It is important to note that the term
‘consumption’ also applies to the ‘making-sense’ and ‘making-value’ of things we use,
places we visit, things we do, in a way that may or may not involve purchase or payment of
any kind. However, it is the case that in the last decade or so many more leisure activities
and sites have become part of the commercialised world. The more obvious geographies
have been noted already in this chapter. There are several other key aspects which are to be
described in this section; for example, the commercialisation of leisure, lifestylisation, leisure
as an individual pursuit, landscape style as part of the commercialisation of leisure, the
leisure ‘gaze’, and new symbolic geographies.
‘Street cred’
During the last decade there has been a massive growth in the commercial promotion of
goods as objects of making lifestyle. Since manufacturing investment fell during the 1980s
significant interest has focused on using land and investment for leisure developments. To
make this new geography work it became necessary for the consequent commercial
development to attract consumers. This coincided with a new profile of demand for leisure.
For example, a new youth culture sought more varied leisure than its parents. Amongst
older people a larger proportion had acquired resources through private pensions and
investments, and others from redundancy. An ageing population means more older people
making leisure, too.
A key feature of the new commercialisation of leisure is its offer of a route to a new
lifestyle, a promotion of ‘product’ directed at both young and old. Investing in new clothes,
cars, kinds of food, visiting new places, taking a longer holiday and taking up a new
pastime provide a new style that offers the prospect of real change in one’s life. Leisure
plays a very central part in this, and has become a major object of contemporary
lifestylisation, making oneself anew, ‘freshening one’s image’, gaining status amongst
one’s peers, gaining ‘street cred’ (Chaney 1996). The presentations of leisure sites with
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION
269
commercial ‘wrapping’ becomes evermore important to promote this new leisure and
connect with desires for lifestyle.
‘Shopping’ became a metaphor for ‘making lifestyle’. This has been
interpreted as part of the break from neighbourhood communities, workplace
friendships and traditional social classes; for example, working classes with their
traditional forms of leisure kept very much within the community (Harrison 1991;
Chaney 1996). Part of this diversity and extended choice in leisure places and
styles is the possibility of detachment, of getting away from familiar, perhaps
claustrophobic, social moorings. At the extreme, people ‘buy’ leisure rather than
‘make it’ amongst themselves. Sharing time becomes less important. We enjoy
leisure more on our own, choice is for the individual and we only need ourselves
to buy something, perhaps as long as the result is seen by ‘someone that matters’.
People, as long as they have enough resources, can take part in anything; this
provides freedom. They can shop, visit theme parks, heritage sites, football
matches and new snooker complexes and film multiplexes. As we have seen in
this chapter there has been an increased diversity and more fragmented association
between a kind of leisure and its location as users change. The geography of socio-
economic groups has also become more fragmented in recent years. The geography
of the leisure activity of any individual and any social group has become more
fragmented and complicated, more finely tuned to local differences. This contrasts
with the time when broad areas of similar social class might have been expected
to make leisure near home. Participation in leisure is much more diverse, and its
geography is too (Clark et al. 1994).
Moreover, the shifts in the economy over the last decade or so have assisted this
geographical adjustment in other ways. These shifts have produced places wanting
development (such as redundant manufacturing sites and less profitable farmland).
There have been shifts of investment into new areas of production, notably leisure,
providing chances to exploit the increased wealth available to part of the population
and to provide new local employment. In order to attract visitor use and investment
there has been commercialisation of places that had previously not been regarded as
interesting for commercial leisure development. The countryside is an example of
this, where previous leisure pursuits had been connected with the open countryside
(for example, for walking, riversides for fishing). This geography has been changed,
as noted earlier, with the advent of heritage developments, theme parks, holiday-
home parks, and so on.
‘McDonaldisation’
Across a number of these new zones of leisure there is a new landscape, epitomised
by the labels ‘McDonaldisation’, or ‘Disneyfication’. This signifies the imprint of
new, very stylised commercial developments which are oriented around food, eating
out and new retailing. These stylised developments are customised and have repeated
and universal designs for customer-product recognition. The sites are individually
‘themed’. Making places commercial and attracting people to use or visit them
depends heavily on making new images, relabelling, and using these images and
labels in advertising these places. Advertising is often very visual and can make
DAVID CROUCH
270
strong use of landscapes. The idea of ‘theming’ is that the development is designed
as one concept, integral, and landscaped together, as typified in theme parks. This
creates a certain repetition of landscape in urban and rural areas. The stylised copying
of ‘rural’ barns and churches by the major supermarket stores, increasingly located
on the edges of cities, makes a curious contrast. In all these cases the design of
places is seen to be all-important (Urry 1990). This connects with the shift towards
heritage fascination.
Heritage leisure, themed sites and ‘the gaze’
The increased interest in ‘heritage’ has contributed new geographical commodities and new
places of interest to visit. There has been a burgeoning interest in heritage, old buildings
and sites. Sites associated with the past have become invoked with new value and this has
been converted, with commercialisation, into new commodities in new sites (Hewison 1987).
Where new sites are produced as heritage sites there is arguably a false geography of
‘unauthentic’, pretend, pastiche, unreal, places. These places become objects of fascination
and the ‘gaze’.
Observers of leisure activity have noted the changing interest towards watching
events. The increasing size of sports stadiums; the development of heritage as displays
and spectacles of past culture, countryside visiting to see the ‘sights’ and the attraction
of street strolling amongst the young are all part of a wider change. In all these there
is an emphasis on watching, gazing detached from the world around us, taking in the
view rather than perhaps participating in an event oneself. This has been labelled ‘the
age of the spectacle’ (Urry 1990). This also produces a new symbolic geography of
leisure.
The new symbolic geography of leisure
In terms of symbolic geography changing patterns of leisure are the result of new
ways in which we ‘think’ of places. Again, the commercialisation of places has
changed meanings previously held. The new themed landscapes can convey new
meanings, and can assist in making a place previously unpopular become very
popular. Hence, places like the run-down canalsides of Birmingham and Manchester
two decades ago would not have been attractive for leisure and instead were
frequently regarded as areas of decay and danger. These have now been reinvested
for leisure, and given new labels, new names and become new landscapes. The
promotion of place has become an important feature in the promotion of leisure,
making the remaking of these places a reality. For example, the theme park
Pleasurewood Hills combines in its name key features that make possible the
complete reimaging of a traditional seaside resort (Yarmouth on the coast of East
Anglia) and make Yarmouth marketable to a new generation. Geography as landscape
has become very important in the promotion of new leisure places. In a similar way,
the symbolic meaning of ‘countryside’ has changed too, as noted at the beginning
of this chapter. Once a symbol of peace and quiet, the countryside now provides a
picture of activity, but activity not associated with traditional farming so much as
playtime, holidays and weekends, Sunday walks (Clark et al. 1994). More than
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION
271
this, it means a mixture of often highly developed and intensively used sites alongside
‘reserves’ of wildlife (Crouch 1992, 1997; Urry 1995).
The ‘new symbolic geography of leisure’ reaches an ultimate in the micro-spaces of
virtual reality, although these provide simultaneously a global and, moreover, fantastic supra-
spatial geography that can be created by turning on on-line. The imaginary landscape can
become almost tangible, providing new dimensions to much older representations of painting,
literature and the imagination alone (Rojek 1995).
Cybercafés
The strange geography of the ‘Net and virtual games’ epitomises one pervasive feature
of this new geography of leisure; that is, the softening of the boundaries, and differences
between many of the leisure activities and the sites where they occur. In particular, the
old distinctions between city and countryside, peace and quiet on the one hand and
excitement and pleasure on the other, have been significantly, though not completely,
loosened and diluted in recent years. There is much more diversity and complexity in
the kind of leisure sites located across the city and across the country. In others places
there is increased distinction and specialisation, such as the new café quarters in city
downtowns that also include cybercafés for swapping Net stories, and in large-scale
specialised watersports areas like Holme Pierrepoint in the East Midlands. In some
ways this produces a very mixed, diverse and fragmented geography of leisure that has
been called ‘post-modern’. The extreme dimensions of this geography are captured in
this almost exotic narrative from the cultural theorist Iain Chambers: ‘the migrant
landscapes of contemporary metropolitan cultures, deterritorialised and de-colonised,
re-situating and re-presenting the common signs… It is perhaps something that we can
hear when Youssou N’Dour, from Dakar, sings in Wolof, a Senegalese dialect, in a tent
pitched in the suburbs of Naples’ (Chambers 1995: 14–15).
Enlarging this changing geography leisure
Perhaps Chambers is being ironic. There are further dimensions to the geography of leisure
so far considered in this chapter, and these are considered in this section (Crouch 1994, 1997,
1998). At the core of ‘consumption’ is an appreciation of ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ can be
encapsulated as sets of beliefs or values that give meaning to ways of life and produce (and
are reproduced through) material and symbolic forms (Crang 1998). In terms of leisure we
make and reproduce culture through what we do and use and the sense we make of places.
The way we ‘make sense’ of leisure ‘products’, events and places is influenced by numerous
contexts: advertising and other media, family, friendships and schooling. All of this helps
us to make sense of places and our lives. My assertion is that this amounts to influences and
‘doing’ much more than can be ‘shaped’ by the commercial world; that would only provide
a certain amount of structure and attraction—we make the rest. We also make leisure in
places that have nothing, or very little, to do with the products of market leisure.
Enjoyment
DAVID CROUCH
272
However, it may be argued that we still ‘consume’ these places and activities. This is so if
we extend the word ‘consumption’ to include experience, enjoyment, and just making sense
of things and places. It is important in mapping the changing geography of leisure in the
UK that the degree of emphasis that is given to the significant physical products of
commercialised leisure, such as big theme parks and renovated districts of the city, is not
exaggerated. Leisure happens in many less dramatically developed places, in everyday
familiar districts of people’s lives. Interpretation depends upon the sources of data considered.
Much of the data available to interpret the geography of leisure is based on commercial
leisure, measures what people spend money on more than what they do, and thus tends to be
self-fulfilling (Crouch and Tomlinson 1994).
Friendship
Many people do take part in leisure away from their familiar social worlds of everyday
life, and many people no longer do exactly what their parents did (and most likely their
parents did not do what their parents did, and so on). Yet friendship and social
relationships remain very important in the way people take part in leisure (Finnegan
1997). Who has been to a theme park alone? —perhaps only geography researchers!
Leisure can provide a shared orientation around which identity is forged, through shared
participation rather than through buying a lifestyle. Instead of traditional, planned
residential areas being the focus of ‘community’, the new geography of community is
likely to be found around networks of leisure sites, dance halls, ‘banger’ racing, caravan
sites, historic enactment sites (Urry 1995). The new commercialised leisure is usually
consumed socially.
Embodiment
Alongside the argument of increasing detachment and ‘gazing’ it is evident that in
many of these events people do ‘join in’ (theme parks, historic enactments, snooker,
dancing, shopping). When people attend more visual displays and performance they
are often very much involved in preparation, walking around the site, eating out and
using many different senses. People may ‘gaze’, but the gazing is part of doing other
things. A more personal, and shared, symbolic geography is produced from places where
people make leisure. The symbolic geography of this activity consists of parks, everyday
streets, clubs and bars, walks in fields and woods as well as the commercialised sites of
consumer leisure with their particular symbolism (Crouch 1998). This means that leisure
geography is ‘all around us’, in familiar places and ‘down the road’. This is an everyday
geography of leisure. It is also a changing geography, because the changes already
discussed in this chapter influence and are influenced by the enjoyment of these everyday
places. Moreover there are adjustments in the social groups attracted to participate in
different kinds of leisure.
Social composition
Although there has been a large social change in Britain that has reduced the ‘working
class’ and their traditional patterns of leisure, such a change is incomplete. Even in
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION
273
mining areas, brass bands continue, as attested by Brassed Off; and allotment holding
remains very popular too. Evidence of social trends suggests there is a continuing link
between socio-economic groups and kinds of leisure, and thus the social geography of
leisure activities may be less radically changed than some interpretations assert (Social
Trends 1995). There does seem to be a number of significant differences between social
groupings. This has important consequences for the popular, ‘lay’ geography of leisure;
that is, what people do, and where. This may be due to the continuing influences of
social class and other social categories on leisure preference, or because social access
to leisure is still very much constrained according to wealth, or both. Thus 46 per
cent of social class A/B visit the cinema and only 24 per cent of D/E do; 6 per cent of
C1 go to bingo, and 17 per cent of D/E do. Theatre visiting subdivides thus: A/B 33
per cent, C1 24 per cent, C2 16 per cent and D/E 10 per cent. Theatre is traditionally
a more ‘middle class’ leisure as are Henley Regatta and Cowes Week (Social Trends
1995). Camping and caravanning, theme park visiting and rock concerts figure almost
the same in each grouping and there is little difference in terms of disco and night
club attendance. However, the aggregations of these categories probably disguise
differences in the kind and cost of participation. There is an age dimension to this,
and ‘going to the pub’ peaks at 25–34 across the aggregated groups, fast food at 25–
34, but going to restaurants remains high from 25 years old to just before retiring
age. Many of these activities are of course very social activities, and most visits from
home are made to visit friends/relatives and to drink/eat (17 per cent and 18 per cent
each) (Social Trends 1995).
Mixing
There is also an extension of traditional leisure activities to new social groups, a
‘discovery’ of ‘new’ leisure activities. Allotment holding is participated by an
increasingly broad social spectrum, which exemplifies a movement in the opposite
direction to the assertion of the gaze. A young middle class has been attracted to a
‘green’ lifestyle and is reconnecting with ideas of locality, place, and partnership (Crouch
1997). Public parks in ordinary residential areas in every city, town and village remain
highly valued everyday ‘lay’ geographies amongst many different social groups
(Comedia 1995; Crouch 1994).
This series of notes on an alternative reading points towards a larger geography of
leisure in the UK. It has been possible to enlarge the geography of leisure beyond a focus on
production (the location of new developments in leisure) in order to embrace more dimensions
of leisure activity and their geographies.
Conclusion
Whatever emphasis is given, the new consumption geography of leisure, in its many
components and places, is influenced by an increasing commercial leisure economy.
Simply describing the most recent large-scale and highly invested leisure
developments and their location does not explain, however, how and where people
are making leisure, nor does it adequately account for the shape of the symbolic
geography of leisure.
DAVID CROUCH
274
It has become much more difficult to be dogmatic about the location of leisure.
With increasing levels of leisure activity so its geography has become more dispersed.
The commercialisation of leisure has contributed to its relocation in purpose-built and
larger, more profitable sites. There remain, however, real profound differences in the
availability of leisure sites and in how different groups access leisure opportunities.
However, the changing boundaries between different activities and their location, the
complexity of small districts of the city, and the diversity of the country make the
complexity and the small-scale variations in the geography of leisure more important to
observe and understand.
References
Bale, J. (1994) Landscapes of Modern Sport, Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Chambers, I. (1995) Popular Culture: the Metropolitan Experience, London: Methuen.
Chaney, D. (1996) Lifestyles, London: Routledge.
Clark, G., Darrall, J., Grove-White, R., Macnaughten, P. and Urry, J. (1994) Leisure
Landscapes, London: CPRE.
Cloke, P. (1993) ‘The commodification of the countryside’, in S.Glyptis (ed.) Leisure and
the Environment, London: Wiley.
Comedia (1995) Parklife, London, Comedia-Demos.
Crang, M. (1998) Cultural Geography, London: Routledge.
Crouch, D. (1992) ‘Popular culture and what we make of the rural’, Journal of Rural
Studies 8(3): 229–40.
Crouch, D. (1994) The Popular Culture of City Parks, London: Comedia-Demos.
Crouch, D. (1997) ‘Others in the rural: leisure practices and geographical knowledge’, in
P.Milbourne (ed.) Revealing Rural Others, London: Cassell.
Crouch, D. (1998) ‘The street and geographical knowledge’, in N.Fyfe (ed.) Images of the
Street, London, Routledge.
Crouch, D. and Tomlinson, A. (1994) ‘Leisure, space and lifestyle: modernity,
postmodernity and identity in self-generated leisure’, in I.Henry (ed.) Modernity,
Postmodernity and Identity, Brighton: Leisure Studies Association.
Crouch, D. and Ward, C. (1997) The Allotment: its Landscape and Culture, Nottingham:
Five Leaves Press.
Finnegan, R. (1997) ‘Music, performance and enactment’, in G.Mackay (ed.) Consumption
and Everyday Life, London: Sage.
Fyfe, N. (ed.) (1998) Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space,
London: Routledge.
Gregson, N. and Crewe, L. (1994) ‘Beyond the high street and the mall: car boot sales as an
enterprise culture out of control?’, Area 26: 261–7.
Harrison, C. (1991) Countryside Recreation in a Changing Society, London: TMS
Partnership.
Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry, London: Methuen.
Miller, D. and Jackson, P. (1998) Shopping, Place, Identity, London: Routledge.
Rojek, C. (1995) Decentring Leisure, London: Routledge.
Shields, R. (1992) Lifestyle Shopping, London: Routledge. Social Trends (1995) London:
OPCS.
Urry, J. (1990) The Tourist Gaze, London: Sage.
Urry, J. (1995) Consuming Places, London: Routledge.
World Wide Fund for Nature/Tourism Concern (1993) Beyond the Green Horizon, London:
WWFN/Tourism Concern.
LEISURE AND CONSUMPTION
275
Further reading
Connections between consumption and place, as well as the idea of symbolic landscapes
and McDonaldisation, are summarised neatly by M.Crang (1998) Cultural Geography
(London: Routledge). On aspects of consumption a useful introduction is D.Chaney (1996)
Lifestyles (London: Routledge). Key works on leisure and ‘the gaze’ include J.Urry (1990)
The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage) and C.Rojek (1995) Decentring Leisure (London:
Routledge). The final chapter of J.Urry (1995) Consuming Places (London: Routledge)
discusses issues of shared leisure and the new environmentalisation in leisure. Leisure
Landscapes (Clarke et al. 1994) examines data on consumers and includes a variety of
valuable insights on leisure outside the cities. Further statistical evidence is to be discovered
in Social Trends and Regional Trends, both published by HMSO annually. D.Crouch (1997)
‘Others in the rural: leisure practices and geographical knowledge’, in P.Milbourne (ed.)
Revealing Rural Others (London: Cassell), explores the newest work in the field, and redefines
the limits of consumption. The journal Leisure Studies is valuable in exploring the interfaces
between geography and leisure. A new text of relevance is D.Crouch (ed.) (1999) Leisure/
Tourism Practices, Knowledge and Geographies (London: Routledge).