"Look at it this way"

This is a very useful report from the Friends of the Lake District It's a really clear piece of research by Dr. Davina Stanford on the costs and benefits of tourism in the Lake District with some case studies from other locations on how they raise money for sustainable tourism and to pay for some of the additional requirements. One option is a Tourist tax expansion. What is the tax spent on? If you have travelled to a European city recently, you will be familiar with the idea of paying a few extra Euros on top of the price of your room. I think I may try to do something with this for our Year 8 unit exploring tourism as it's a lovely area for young people to learn about. Who Pays for the Lake District? Tourism is a vital part of the #LakeDistrict economy – but it comes at a cost. It’s time to talk about the problems and the solutions. Read our report here: https://t.co/1IYKJxZmly #WhoPays pic.twitter.com/liwxF8Pok7 — Friends of the Lake District (@FriendsofLakes) November 20...

Michael Palin was on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. He was asked about what travelling might be like in the future as we come out of lockdown and lose our holidays. How should we cope with that. " I think you can travel less and travel better. If we have to be confined to travelling in the UK, it's not a bad place to travel - there are all sorts of wonderful places - and different landscapes and different sorts of atmospheres - Northern Scotland, Cornwall. Go to places and learn more about them, enjoy them more. Find out more about your own country. It's going to be very difficult for people right across the world to actually travel again as we did before until we find a vaccine. Nobody is going to pack people into aeroplanes as they did before. No cheap and cheerful flights around the world. It's going to be very difficult to see the rest of the world. So narrow your horizons is not necessarily a bad thing. Look more carefully Look more thoroughly L...

An interesting website which explores the growing pressures on Iceland. It's written by Ellis Quinn, who writes on the Eye on the Arctic website. When most people think of Arctic economic development, things like resource extraction are usually first to mind. But northern regions and chambers of commerce are increasingly touting tourism as a key economic tool. It’s seen as an industry that creates jobs for a variety of education levels, promotes small-scale entrepreneurship, reinforces and promotes local cultures, and creates the sustainable development lacking in many of the expensive and hard-to-get-to regions of the North; whether the remote Indigenous communities of Arctic Canada and Greenland, or the villages of Finnish Lapland and northern Russia. But tourism is far from the benign industry it’s often made out to be. As Iceland has discovered, mass tourism in the North can have social and environmental impacts as profound as those of the mining or drilling industries. Ye...

Take the opportunity over the summer to explore an (un)familiar landscape a little more... I'll be heading for Devon. In North Devon there is a chance to take part in a special Mission:Explore set of missions , which have already been attempted almost 400 times (at the time of writing) Many landscapes have a designation as an AONB , and this would be a useful context for exploring landscapes... There's plenty on these 'landscapes for life' at the AONB page. Could be a great context for KS3...

There are apparently 93 different brown signs as shown on maps and roadsigns. They denote locations which are of tourist interest. I know this because I've been following the Brown Sign Way... AMANDA HONE's BROWN SIGN BLOG is going to document visits to as many Brown sign locations as possible. Why not explore the BROWN SIGNS in your local area - once you start noticing them, you'll find them everywhere (although I might have an advantage living in a tourist area of Norfolk...) In the village where I used to live there was an interesting labelling. The brown sign used the generic "FARM PARK" to point to the attraction, which was actually called "PARK FARM": some locals assumed the sign had been made with the words the wrong way round... One of my nearest brown signs.... picture by Alan Parkinson Follow Amanda's progress on TWITTER and check out the blog. These signs, like any road signs are part of the landscape : we don't necessarily notice ...

Ecotricity are the company behind the huge turbines at Swaffham that I pass regularly - went past them last week on the way to a conference at UEA. They have a very useful website which features a whole range of resources. There is a time lapse video showing the construction of one of their installations. I particularly liked the interactive map of their installations, and also the PDF downloads of the plans, for example the wind turbines that they are putting into Manchester City's football ground. These include photomontages and maps showing how the turbines will look once they are in place. Swaffham is also KINGDOM COUNTRY after the Sunday evening ITV series starring Stephen Fry. Two of the students I teach featured in a recent episode as they were in a local cricket team which hosted filming of an episode. The local tourist authorities are finally waking up to the potential that this has to attract visitors. I used to live quite close to Holmfirth: the Last of the Summer W...