The Beatles as Place Makers: Narrated Landscapes in Liverpool, England

Abstract

Forty years after their rise to international fame, the Beatles continue to be a presence on the cultural landscape. More than any other place, Liverpool remains intrinsically linked with the Beatles' legacy. This paper explores the ways in which the Beatles continue to affect the meaning of places in Liverpool. Framed by both commercial and governmental agencies as a tourist landscape, the places associated with the Beatles are represented to visitors through narratives that selectively employ particular discourses related to the Beatles. The fieldwork for this research suggests that the landscape of Beatles places in Liverpool is composed of a patchwork of authentic, replicated or historically unrelated commercial and vernacular places. Narratives forwarded by the local tourism industry weave the places together as a unified landscape and locate visitors in relation to it. This research draws from and expands upon literatures of music geographies, and the commodification of experience through heritage tourism. Drawing upon post-structural conceptualizations of discourse and the lack of fixity of cultural texts, the following account is an analysis and discussion of the relationships between representations of the Beatles and representations of places in Liverpool with which they are associated.