Performing and directing resident/tourist cultures in Heartbeat country

Abstract

Goathland is the main filming location for the Yorkshire Television series Heartbeat, which has instigated a very large increase in visitors to the village, and given rise to certain symbolic conflicts that orbit around a contestation between Goathland’s traditional identity as a quiet moorland ‘community’ and its virtual identity as Aidensfield in the television series. The residents of Goathland are very anxious about this and advocate strategies of tourism management and control that are founded on an ideological construction of authentic ‘rural life’ in which they have culturally and economically invested - both in terms of local property ownership and lifestyle preferences. It is residents’ stated views on the cultural politics of ‘ Heartbeat tourism’ that provide the empirical grounding for the article. Conceptually, the emphasis is on exploring the performative cultures and processes that construct and contest the meaning of place within a tourism context. This approach not only examines the ideological underpinnings of what residents say but reveals the spatial practices they reflexively construct as a form of praxis. Finally, it is argued that many of the so-called tourism impacts experienced by Goathland residents are about wider cultural and economic dynamics manifesting as localized spatial conflicts which are not revealed by uncritical research methods or readily available to a managerial or technical fix.