Tourism related to locations

1. MapStream Activity Prompt
Can be used with EDINA Digimap for Schools / MapStream
“Is this where Mr Darcy got wet ?” – exploring film and TV tourism
Designed for use with Google Earth, but can be used with other GIS clients as appropriate.
People visit places as tourists for many reason. Tourism attracts people to stately homes, historical sites,
stretches of sand and shingle, battlefields, restored steam railways, forests, mountain summits and busy
city centres. Different people want different things from their leisure time.
All of these are represented on OS maps in a growing range of tourist symbols which are all shown
using the colour blue.
Within the UK, there is something to interest and intrigue most people, although we obviously don’t
have the full range of climate and vegetation that other global locations might offer. It is our cultural
heritage that is stronger than most countries, and an increasingly important part of popular culture is
made up of television and film media.
Over the last decade, there has been a growing interest in visiting the locations where popular TV
programmes and films are/were made, to visit the places that were shown on screen, and perhaps to
‘connect’ with popular cultural aspects of people’s lives. New Zealand, for example experienced a major
boost in visitors after Peter Jackson’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy of films was shot there, and the
filming of ‘The Hobbit’ in the same locations promises to resurrect a multi-million dollar boost to the
country’s economy.
The ‘Lord of the Rings’ continues to attract people to New Zealand some years after the films were
released, with tours, maps of the locations and jobs created for local people who were in the right place
at the right time.
More recently at the end of February 2012, the short film ‘The Shore’, set in Northern Ireland was
awarded an Oscar. A local bar where some of the scenes were shot put out the red carpet to welcome
drinkers. This increase in the profile of a location is sometimes called ‘place placement’ (a similar phrase
‘product placement’ describes the benefits for products of being associated with a particular film or
character)
Bristol is synonymous with Aardman animation, and the soap ‘Emmerdale’ was originally made on
location in a number of villages in the Yorkshire Dales, before a purpose-built set was constructed near
Leeds.
This interest is not confined to adults. When the Children’s TV programme ‘Balamory’ was launched,
tens of thousands of children arrived on the Scottish island of Mull to visit the colourful houses of
Tobermory. Research carried out on the impact of the visitors is described in this useful report from the
University of Stirling: https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/bitstream/1893/784/1/Balamory%20Revisited.pdf

2. The series ‘Midsomer Murders’ brought some controversy when local people suggested that the high
death toll in the programmes might put people off buying property in the area. The line between truth
and fiction can sometimes be blurred.
‘Downton Abbey’ has been one of the most successful TV programmes in recent years, and the location
of the house at Highclere Castle in Berkshire has seen a major boost in visitor numbers as a result. Look
at the house’s website: http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/ and you will see that the connection is
certainly made explicit to any potential visitor, and even has a section on the making of the TV series:
http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/downton-abbey.html
This same rise in visitor numbers was recorded in 2010, for example, by Anthony House in Cornwall,
which was chosen by Tim Burton for filming his version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Alternatively, you
might find the film crews for ‘The Only way is Essex’ while shopping in Braintree.
It is not just stately homes that see an increase in visitor numbers when popular culture takes hold.
A David Hockney trail is being established in East Yorkshire following his enormously popular show at
the Royal Academy of Art in Summer 2012. Visitors will see the Yorkshire Wolds inland from Bridlington:
an area which has not seen such attention for a long time. The rolling downlands and avenues of trees
were the subject of Hockney’s large canvases showing the changing seasons.
There was also recent interest in the landscape of Scotland when the tourist board made some explicit
links with Disney/Pixar during the publicity for the film ‘Brave’. This has involved a number of joint
events and marketing. The landscape of Scotland plays a major role in the film, and this is reflected in
the advertising campaign. There are also plans for tours of the locations in the film. These are being
developed by Disney, which shows the global reach of some films. The cultural connection with the
landscape is a major element of the experience here. It is a reminder that places are ‘socially
constructed’.
Some recent (and not so recent) examples of TV series and the locations that they were connected with
are shown below.
Can you identify some others, perhaps local to you ?
TV Programme Location which tourists visited Notes
Heartbeat North Yorkshire Moors Known as ‘Adensfield’
Last of the Summer Wine
Country
Holmfirth, West Yorkshire
Doc Martin Cornwall
Call the Midwife East End of London
Hollyoaks Chester
The Prisoner Portmeirion Cult 1960s series with a global
following
All Creatures Great and Small Thirsk, North Yorkshire Based on the books by James
Herriot
Midsomer Murders South Oxfordshire & http://www.visitmidsomer.com/

3. Buckinghamshire
Some locations are created as tourist attractions in their own right. The Granada Studios Tour in
Manchester was a separate location in its own right, and welcomed tens of thousands of visitors to walk
the famous cobbles. It is now closed, and a new bespoke production facility for ‘Coronation Street’ is
being built as part of Media City UK in Salford, Manchester. This is next to the new BBC studios, which
have seen a lot of programmes moving north from London.
http://www.salford.gov.uk/d/MCUK_Welcome_Map_Download-V2.pdf
See the Digimap for Schools KS4 Activity: ‘BBC Looks North’ for more on Salford Quays.
http://digimapforschools.edina.ac.uk/resources.html
There is also a great deal of interest in the Harry Potter books and films, and this led to the opening of
the Harry Potter Studio Tour attraction, near Watford (not quite Hogwarts)
http://www.wbstudiotour.co.uk/
A final media which is worth exploring is that of games. Increasingly, these are rendering city locations in
tremendous accuracy so that they can form the background to the action. The addition of 3D buildings
to locations in Google Earth (including some of the buildings on the Olympic Park) offers interesting
potential for example. Augmented Reality is also being developed to a point where it may have real
classroom benefits too.
Suggested activities for students:
In each case, the relevant location for the programme is obtained, using MapStream / Digimap for
Schools. See accompanying resources for how to add the OS map layer to your chosen GIS client if you
prefer to do this.
1. Go location hunting for a programme that you like watching – where is it filmed ?
Identify a relevant TV programme and location, and create a leaflet which provides a little bit of
information about the relevance of the location to the filming: why is the landscape (whether urban or
rural) relevant to the programme. Source an appropriate map to show the location of the filming.
Extra bonus points for selecting a TV programme which doesn’t already have a lot written about it.
For plenty of ideas on films and their locations, visit the Reel Streets website:
http://www.reelstreets.com
There may be a film that was made close to you. A nice homework extension activity would be to source
images which match the locations in the film and send them in to the website for inclusion.

4. 2. Consider the impacts of visitors on a location. There are positives and negatives of this. Create an
annotated map at a larger scale than the previous activity, which shows some potential implications
of film crews working in this area, with some examples of places that may be affected in some way.
See the ‘Changing placemarks’ document for more information on how to edit a Google Earth
placemark
Some possible impacts:
Local accommodation: hotels and B&Bs would be able to make money from rooms and meals
for the crew (although they may provide their own on-site catering)
Roads may be closed, and diversions in place to remove noise and allow streets to be set up.
For historical dramas, modern features may need to be covered up e.g. double yellow lines,
satellite dishes on properties, cars parked out of the way etc. There may be employment for
local tradesmen building sets and temporary structures.
People working on these productions will be able to learn the appropriate skills to enable them
to get employment on further productions and there may be connections with local drama
schools and technical colleges
Use the annotation tools in your chosen GIS client to add annotations outlining a series of likely impacts
for the location that you have chosen.
This could be in the context of a fictional programme that is going to be filmed in an area close to the
school. You could also cast the students in the role of location scouts, and provide the details of
particular scenes from the film…
e.g. the two main characters meet on a bridge across a river
3. Using the example of the BRAVE tour that is described here, create a similar tour for another film
that you are familiar with. You need to identify locations which could be visited, along with a route
to connect them that is suitable for coaches, and some places for overnight accommodation and
meals.
http://www.adventuresbydisney.com/europe/scotland-vacations/
Additional ideas for teachers:
1. Follow the Ordnance Survey on Twitter. The @OSleisure feed has had a series of competitions
where a film location has been shown, with the labels that might identify it easily having been
removed. This activity could be done using some of the tools in QGIS or Google Earth to add
coloured boxes to obscure the information. A recent post showed how the location of filming
the TV soap ‘Emmerdale’ has changed over the years – to a present-day purpose built set on the
Harewood Estate: http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/2012/10/emmerdale-celebrates-40-years-
and-three-beautiful-locations/
2. ALVA is the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions: http://www.alva.org.uk/ - they provide a
series of resources which could be useful for exploring this idea further. Many of the regional

5. tourist boards offer maps of TV locations as part of their marketing in Tourist Information
Centres (TICs), e.g. the example from Yorkshire below.
3. Have a competition and award special prizes to students who can provide pictures of
themselves in famous locations. Produce a classroom ‘Hall of Fame’ display, a little like the
pavement outside Grumman’s Chinese Theatre with their stars on the ‘Walk of Fame’.
Students can enter the hall of fame if they show a link with a celebrity or TV programme of some
kind.
4. Identify a specific type of ‘niche tourism’, and invite students to research it, and the
geographical impacts of its development
e.g.
Tolkien tourism (New Zealand and Oxford – going to be booming again because of ‘The Hobbit’),
Chocolate tourism (Cadbury World and York), Agritourism, Birth tourism, Culinary tourism (Padstow,
Bray), Heritage tourism, Health tourism…
Some relevant BBC News articles:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6964375.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/artsandculture/7977226/Film-locations-in-Britain-Tamara-Drewe-
and-the-lure-and-illusion-of-cinema-tourism.html

6. 5. The RGS-IBG Discovering Antarctica website has an activity called IMAGINING ANTARCTICA
which asks students to explore the continent and work towards developing a movie. All the
relevant resources are included on the website:
http://www.discoveringantarctica.org.uk/1a_imagining.php
6. You may wish to check out the ‘Follow the Brown Signs’ blog of Amanda Hone.
She featured in a recent issue of GA Magazine, and has since visited a lot more places to check
out some hidden gems.
http://www.followthebrownsigns.com/ has all the details on these brown signs – where is your
nearest brown-signed attraction ?
And finally:
It was Lyme Park in Cheshire where Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy famously got his shirt wet
Alan Parkinson
October 2012