Idealog - September 2006

These postings first appeared on www.westwood232.blogger.com on the dates shown.

Paris - The World As Plaything

23.09.06

In 1783, only six years before the start of the French Revolution, work began to build a village for Queen Marie Antoinette.

The Queen had a part of the vast estate at Versailles for her own use: even her husband, Louis XVI, could only enter with her permission. Her main possession there was Le Petit Trianon, a house begun twenty years earlier, where a formal garden with fountain and flower beds gave the Queen her own small world to command. But formal gardens - the 'French' style - were going out of fashion as Rousseau talked about the virtues of 'going back to nature' and the 'English garden' style was becoming popular. Marie Antoinette has such a garden laid out in the mid 1770s. Then she added a theatre in which she and her friends could perform plays - in some she acted the part of a shepherdess.

The Queen loved her little world, which was one of make believe. She could act in her theatre and she could act in this, her corner of the Versailles Estate. Marie Antoinette wanted a world of her own. so it was that in 1783 the architect Richard Mique began to oversee the building of eleven 'village' buildings that he designed in a picturesque style which seem to have blended real traditions with fictions from the royal imagination. A house for the Queen, a mill (pictured here), a farm, a dairy, a barn and others were placed decorously around a lake. The farm has cows, sheep and goats and crops of cereals and fruit. Here, Marie Antoinette could entertain her friends, serve food from 'her' farm - its production owed nothing to her own hand - as well as act as the lady of the village.

It was a life whose days would be numbered. Deeply unpopular with the wider French public, she and her husband, Louis XVI, died under the blade of the guillotine in 1793.

Now, her village, L'Hameau de la Reine has been restored. surviving buildings again appear as they did more than two hundred years ago. Crops, fruit and flowers are growing and animals graze in fields. There is a wonderful sense of the private, safe, fictitious world that the Queen inhabited, cut off from the harsh realities of rural France. The restoration and presentation has been thorough. Hardly any presence can be felt of attendants or curators, so that ordinary visitors are able to enjoy the little world in a way that they never could in the 1780s.

Marie Antoinette's village is one of the earliest - perhaps the earliest - example of an aspect of the world being created to preserve, present and perform a particular way of life for visiting people. It is part museum, part 'living history', now part educational project. At one and the same time it is both real and fake, as it always was. We can understand more of the way of life of the French monarchy when we see it and glimpse into the mind of the royal system that ruled France. It is possible to visualise life in farms and cottages on the eighteenth century while at the same time begin to measure the gap between Marie Antoinette's fantasy and life as it really was, a gap so wide and destructive that it helped bring about a revolution. And we can see an early example of those showcases that included the great museums and world expositions, through the open air museums and theme parks to present day conservation areas and discovery centres, all of which seek to entertain, explore and educate in varying proportions.
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Paris - The Unexpected

22.09.06

The Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Paris Opera ... the big attractions are on the map and always to be found - and enjoyed. A city like Paris has always got hundreds of events under way, big and small. Music and arts are everywhere: painters with their easels reproducing a view, or musicians playing alone or in bands.

At the Arc de Triomphe Du Carroussel a steel band from Trinidad and Tobago entertained with driving rhythms and mellifluous petrol-drums tuned and played almost to sound like brass instruments. Caribbean music alternated with American big band jazz and European romantic tunes. Dancers paced around the edge, banner wavers stepped in procession after them, though the musicians themselves were both a dance troupe and a choir as well.

Travelling is fun when you find famous landmarks, but even better when you meet people from different nationalities and cultures who are able to appreciate each other's traditions. At that moment they become one group enjoying what the world has to offer, with no distances to divide them, just sharing human warmth and expression.
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Paris - Tourism Traces

21.09.06

On the Rue St Honore, close to the Place Vendome, is the shop of Goyard, Malletier, or in other words Goyard: Trunk Maker. The fascia still shows in gold letters the travel goods for which the shop was famous: steamer trunks and baskets, and the claim "dresses carefully packed". Around the area are other shops serving the wealthy, many of whom come to Paris as tourists.

Maison Goyard is the oldest maker of trunks still in existence, having been a company under that name since 1853. Edme Goyard had joined the Maison Morel which itself dated back to 1792. When his son Francois bought that shop in 1853 it was renamed for himself and his father. Although no longer owned by the family (in the 1990s it was bought by the Signoles family) the business still makes trunks and sells them through a small number of outlets world wide. They are made to order in Carcassone in the south of France. Famous customers have included Madonna, Karl Lagerfeld, Gregory Peck and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whom it must be said was also quite famous for his cases.
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Paris - As Old As You Feel

20.09.06

In the left bank area of St Germain-Des-Pres is what claims to be the very first coffee shop in the world. Named after its Sicilian founder, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, it is known now as Le Procope. The cafe began life in 1686. Over the years it witnessed many changes in France and was used by the people who helped bring them about, such as Voltaire and the young Napoleon. Benjamin Franklin came from America to drink coffee here. In 1989 the restaurant was redesigned in the style of the eighteenth century. It has inside the feel of a spacious - and quite opulent - house, with several rooms set out for diners to use. The area around is lively and full of interest, with the Sorbonne university close by and numerous bookshops and publishing houses. It may be over three centuries old, but it's as full of life as ever.
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Paris - Captured And Kept

19.09.06

On the Grand Tour the rich nobleman could buy a piece of sculpture or a painting in Paris or Rome, or a book of architecture with classical illustrations after Palladio. When George Eastman invented his cheap camera and photo developing service the sales slogan "You push the button and we will do the rest" let everyone capture a scene and take it home. It was as if the traveller had physically removed a view and added it to their personal possessions back home. Now, digital photography lets us take a hundred photos where we used to take a dozen. Video recording adds movement, changing perspectives and soundtracks, as if whole events are being snatched from the scene encountered. Real life is being turned into a permanent, personal record on tape or disc. Sociologists have pointed out that taking photos or film is often the central activity of visiting, even more than studying the view direct, since some travellers want to speed around a destination and leave the studying until they are back at home - boring the pants off the neighbours invted round to see the show.

Taylor, John (1994) A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography, and the Tourist's Imagination, Manchester, Manchester University Press
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Tourism Traces - Rothesay

10.09.06

In the old days .... of tourism, that is .... it was Not Done in Britain to be seen removing clothes in order to put on swimming costume. Hiding behind a towel on the beach was not enough. Bathing machines like this one in a display at Rothesay on the Scottish Isle of Bute had to be used. They could be wheeled down to the water so that the ever-so-discrete bather could change inside and step down straight into the sea. Horses would pull the shed-on-wheels back up the beach after being used.

Some women's garments were designed to spread out on the water to act as a kind of umbrella, hiding any fabric clinging to the body in the water. Both sexes wore neck to ankle attire. It was all part of the effort at selling the seaside to the middle classes in Victorian Britain. The Georgian ruling classes of the days before had gained a reputation for immorality savagely criticised in cartoons of the day and Victoria and Albert led a movement aimed at being seen to be clean living. Well, sea bathing would have helped that.

So long as there was no hint of public nudity, of course.
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Bookshelf

06.09.06

Diamonds In The Sky
Kenneth Hudson and Julian Pettifer
Bodley Head/BBC
1979
ISBN 0 370 30162 5
£7.95

Probably out of print and getting on a bit, but still useful if you can find it in a library or second-hand. This book grew out of Hudson's earlier Air Travel: A Social History and was revised to accompany Julian Pettifer's BBC TV series of the same name. Read it first and then move to Simon Calder's No Frills and then Pat Hanlon's Global Airlines for an excellent coverage of the growth and current situation of the world passenger airline industry. The late Kenneth Hudson's work in the field of industrial history gives the book its solid, knowledgeable base, and Pettifer's quality journalistic approach combine to produce an excellent account.
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Bookshelf

06.09.06

Global Airlines
Pat Hanlon
Elsevier/Butterworth Heinemann
1999 (2nd edition)
ISBN 0 7506 4350 1
£29.99

Illustrated is the second edition of an excellent book which is packed with useful background, facts and figures and discussions of issues. For all its size and importance, there are not so many text books on passenger services by air (and certainly not many on airports). Plane spotters' books and works on military aircraft are two a penny (well, you know what I mean). This book packs a lot in to a small space. As the second edition it is getting out of date compared with the fast-changing state of the airline industry, but the author's May 2006 book Global Airlines: Competition in a Transnational Industry pushes the story forward.
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Bookshelf

04.09.06

No Frills: The Truth Behind The Low-Cost Revolution In The Skies
Simon Calder
2002
Virgin Books, London
ISBN 1 85227 932 X (hb)
£16.99 (hb)
Paperbook edition available

Despite the specific title, this is one of the most useful books about air travel over the last few decades. Simon Calder is the Travel Editor of the Independent newspaper in the UK, making a point in his travelling as a journalist never to accept freebies from operators. His style is crisp and readable, though sometimes so concise that it takes a couple of re-readings to get his exact meaning clearly. This is not an academic text book but has solid information built up from years observing the industry, and is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand just what is happening in the industry - and why - and where it is going.
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Bookshelf

04.09.06

Naked Airport: A Cultural History Of The World's Most Revolutionary Structure
Alastair Gordon
2004
Metropolitan Books, New York
ISBN 0 8050 6518 0 (hb)
$27.50 (hb)

You might want to quibble with Gordon's referring to the airport as a single structure and the claim that it is the most revolutionary. It demands cries of 'what about railway stations - religious buildings - what about the wheel?'. Leaving that to one side, this is a fascinating and revealing book about the evolution of airports. The examples of very largely American, but it is undeniable how influential those have been. Understanding the lure, acceptance and growth of air travel is made much clearer by following how thinking about airport designs has changed. New York's La Guardia was originally to be a combined flying boat and land aircraft base: there were designs for virtually assembly-line style servicing. If you want to know the future, read about the past, said someone. Then we know where we're going - by plane.
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Tourism Needs Transport - Cruising

03.09.06

The cruise liner 'Costa Mediterranea' makes its careful way down the Canale della Giudecca in Venice. Love 'em or loathe 'em, cruise liners are bigger and better and the business is booming. The Freedom of the Seas, launched in April 2006, weighs 160,000 tons and carries 4,375 passengers. Size might matter for many things, but design is also important in providing what the customers want - luxury, entertainment or private space viewing the sea. At the other end of the scale the part-sailing, part engine-powered Wind Star is only 5,300 tons and takes 150 people on something like an old-style clipper ship.

The cruise ship pictured looks like a gross intrusion on Venice's incomparable architecture, but the city only exists because it has always been a maritime hub. In 1574, Henry III of France popped in for dinner and the city's arsenolotti knocked out a complete galley from keel-laying to launching in the time it took him to eat. The huge modern cruise ship terminal is one of the world's busiest. While Venice's population is declining fast the importance of the trade done there is very high. Of course the city's water-borne icon is the gondola, closely followed (and overtaken at speed) by the vaporetto, the motoscafo and the motonave, diesel-powered water buses serving the city and islands of the surrounding lagoon.

Touring by cruising is increasingly popular as the ships become more like little cities, with huge restaurants, theatres, cinemas, swimming pools and shops in addition to the privacy of the cabins and state rooms. The simplicity of seeing the world from the safe world of the ship while all your needs are met is only one attraction. You are more likely to get to know people when you share the space of the ship with them for a week or two. It's likely they share your interests and outlook on life, and there are opportunities for building up friendships. The hawkers, beggars and pickpockets who operate within a ordinary city are not around.

The detractors say it isn't really touring, just staying in a resort that happens to move around a bit. They might say that one bit of open sea is just the same as the next, and the trips ashore, if taken at all, are nearly as insulated from the real world as the ship is. Being loaded onto a coach and taken to some carefully-chosen market place or tourist entertainment is no way to interact with local places and people. Both the ship and the coach are steel cocoons where the textures, sounds and sights of the real world are kept at a safely controlled distance.

On the other hand, as every other traveller has found over the centuries, you've got to start somewhere.
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Tourism Needs Transport - Tour Bus

02.09.06

Whole companies exist whose business is entirely to run tours using buses, open-topped like this Grayline example in New York. In Britain one of the largest is Guide Friday of Stratford-on-Avon, which now has tours running throughout Britain - and also abroad. In the USA, trolleybus tours exist on many of the main tourist cities, using specially adapted vehicles which are not actually trolleybuses picking up electric power from an overhead cable. London has had open-topped tours since the early 1950s when they were introduced by the London Passenger Transport Board.

Having a guide (or a recorded commentary) describe what the passengers are seeing as they make a tour is one of the many ways of interpreting a place to visitors. Guide books and leaflets, visitor- and heritage centres, wayside panels and personal audio commentary devices are some of the main channels of communication. They are often provided by many different bodies and so might duplicate or even contradict each other's messages, but that is a normal feature of the mass media. Tourism officers, city managers and public relations officers who know their jobs use such channels alongside the more obvious TV, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising, holiday brochures or direct mail leaflets. There have been guides for visitors in popular cities since at least the middle ages. Rome, the focal point for the European Grand Tour, had guides even earlier who took people around main attractions such as the catacombs.

The principle of guides leading walks had not only been transferred to buses like those in New York and London, but also onto boats and some railway journeys, where printed guide books were common in the nineteenth century, so having a person do it is a logical extension. As usual, getting the low down on a city - or any other place - from the comfort and security of a bus tour is a popular tourist activity. Good guides can add music, sound effects and plenty of humour to the best tours.

Which leaves just the problem that has always puzzled me. Why are Grayline buses always red?
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Tourism Needs Transport - Airplane

01.09.06

Some people have refused to travel in one of these things because it isn't a proper plane. Proper planes have proper, jet engines, not er - proper-pellers. That's the story. At one time people might have refused to travel in a jet aircraft because it didn't have propellers. The 1950s British Comet airliner had engines set flush into the wings, which meant it didn't seem at first to have engines at all.

There are advantages to the older type of aircraft, noisy though they might be. Prop planes tend to fly lower as they operate shorter, feeder routes and they have a lower operating 'ceiling' being smaller. This means that they often give a better view of the world below, clouds permitting. Like smaller jets they usually board via a walk across the tarmac and a set of steps, so have a better feeling of Real Travel. OK, that might mean getting soaking wet and if you don't care too much for flying you feel a bit less safe away from the cocooning air bridge, but travelling is about experience and its part of knowing what it involves.

If the plane is a high-wing version the view isn't obscured by a great, grey slab outside your window. Why do I always seem to get the seat with a panoramic view of an engine? I think it's true that with lower flying there is less chance of a double-glazed porthole having an annoying patch of water droplets condensed inside. It ruins the view and the photographs. And a lower altitude cuts the haze that does exactly the same.

One of the best developments, notably on Airbus planes, is the video feed from a camera mounted to see forward, just as the crew can see. I always thought that ought to be introduced, and it was. Coming in to an airport the fact that you can see way ahead to a comforting, long, runway is far better than being unable to see anything in front of you. What about providing more by way of sound? Some airlines have given a channel to let you hear pilot-control tower conversations. Others have explained in their seat-back publicity what all those bumps and rumbles are that make you think the floor has just collapsed. Computer-generated maps showing where the aircraft is have been added to most TV entertainment systems - a commentary produced by a GPS-triggered locational device could tell you more about where you are, what is happening, and even what cities you're actually passing by have to offer the traveller. You might be tempted to go there next time, a happier and appreciative flyer.
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