Counter-tourism: The Handbook

Counter-Tourism: The Handbook equips readers with tactics and guiding principles to use on a personal journey through the heritage-tourism machine. They can pursue it as a three-stage progression from tactics, through interventions and on to open infiltration, or take it as all part of the same journey to be dipped into at any point.

For anyone who''s ever been a tourist, Counter-Tourism is an invitation to completely transform our experience of the heritage-tourism industry and its many sites (castles, National Trust properties, etc.). It provides a set of powerful lenses, designed to bend a whole world of conventional tourism into a spiral of new perspectives and experiences. Beneath those simple sounding stories in the Visitor Guide and behind the locked gates marked PRIVATE in heritage sites, there lies a multitude of inconvenient stories, hilarities, wonders, absurdities, extremes and entertaining outrages. When Counter-Tourism opens the doors, tourism becomes a funny, shocking, revealing, subversive and life-changing experience rather than a deferential procession through the unrevealing stately homes of Heritage plc. Counter-Tourism upsets the sanitising efforts of the heritage industry. Counter-tourism is also a journey of mini-pilgrimages, challenges and pleasures. It celebrates the multiplicities of meanings in every heritage venue and upsets all the heritage industry''s attempts at meaning-control and homogenisation. With hundreds more tactics and images, philosophical diversions and asides, the Handbook is for anyone who wants to explore the ideas of counter-tourism in more depth. Part 2 of the Handbook has ideas on how to extend the tactics described in Part 1 into interventions that can be planned and performed in heritage sites. And Part 3 goes on to suggest open ''infiltrations'' that can be used by artists, performers, radical tourists and even heritage site managers themselves to reinvent their own sites. Alongside this there''s a photo-essay on using the tactics, and a full bibliography.