Paul Kirkley: Tourists? Don’t get me started
So, it’s finally happened. After 18 years in the city, I have finally acceded to true Cambridge resident status – by getting annoyed at all the bloody tourists.
Being annoyed at bloody tourists is a Cambridge birthright I wasn’t sure would ever be available to a johnny-come-lately like me. Because, in my heart, I suppose I still felt like a bit of a tourist myself. But after nearly two decades of paying my taxes in this town, I’ve decided I’ve earned the right to scowl and mutter darkly under my breath every time I’m railroaded off the pavement by a crowd of slack-jawed gawpers.
The other Saturday was particularly mad. I counted at least 30 coaches parked along The Backs, with more of them spilling down West Road and Grange Road, and every square metre of the city centre was rammed with swarms of people shuffling along behind tour guides holding up brightly-coloured table tennis bats.
And yes, I know our local economy relies a lot on tourism, and that – especially post-Covid – we should all be grateful to see our shops and cafés full. Plus it’s a source of civic pride, that so many people want to come and see our beautiful medieval city. (As opposed to places like Doncaster or Kettering or Sleaford, where I imagine tourist coaches only stop if they’ve broken down.)
Plus, aren’t we all tourists, at some level? Even those insufferable people who insist on calling themselves ‘travellers’. You know the sort – the ones who describe places as ‘a bit touristy’, seemingly oblivious to the fact they are, in fact, tourists.
So I’m not suggesting Cambridge should have fewer tourists. I’m simply saying I’ve earned the right to find them bloody annoying.
While caught in a tourist slipstream, I found myself being carried on a tide of rucksacks into the city’s Harry Potter shop (or The Department of Magical Gifts, to use its rather canny, copyright-swerving official name) – an establishment whose existence was news to me.
As a Potter agnostic – personally I’m more of a His Dark Materials man, but my kids love it, and that’s good enough for me – I’m amazed at the continuing cultural reach of those stories. It’s 16 years since the last book was published, and 12 years since the last film adaptation. And yet – despite the time lag, and the various attempts to cancel JK Rowling – Pottermania shows no sign of abating. (On the contrary, HBO has just commissioned what feels like an entirely superfluous new TV adaptation.)
Perhaps, to the chagrin of those people who dismiss them as “those silly wizard stories”, we simply have to accept that Harry Potter is now an ingrained part of these islands’ cultural weft, alongside Shakespeare, Dickens and The Beatles. Unfortunately for Cambridge, the city doesn’t have any actual Potter connections to speak of – so I guess we’ll just have to keep trading off Newton and Darwin and Hawking and all those losers.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true what I said earlier – about living and paying taxes in Cambridge. Because I’m technically just outside the city, on the unfashionable side of the A14. But for how long, if Michael Gove gets his way?
Now look, I know Britain has a chronic shortage of new homes. But the so-called levelling up secretary’s back-of-a-fag-packet wheeze to build a gazillion houses in Cambridge – a plan that came as a surprise to our local authorities, to put it mildly – does make you wonder if he hasn’t been at the old marching powder again.
For a start, as everyone from the local mayor to former Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey – not a sentence I’d have envisaged writing a few years ago – has pointed out, the area already has a chronic lack of infrastructure, including access to water. Plus I’m a bit baffled as to how focusing all your energy on one of the country’s most prosperous/unaffordable (delete according to income) cities qualifies as ‘levelling up’. But then Gove is an Oxford man, of course – so maybe this is all just some form of long revenge?
And before anyone accuses me of nimbyism, the problem is not so much that they’re planning to build in my back yard, but that my back yard would now be in the middle of a gigantic urban sprawl. I would, effectively, have moved from the country to the town, without budging so much as an inch. So pardon me for having an opinion on it.
In his latest bit of PR blether, Gove extolled the ‘Medici model’ of “beautiful homes, flourishing public spaces, cultural jewels, safe and orderly streets, space for trees, centres of educational excellence…” And so on and so on.
Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? So why do I have a sneaking suspicion it would actually end up being more like one of those vast, sprawling dystopian sci-fi metropolises – like Mega-City One from Judge Dredd? Except with less water and more way more e-scooters.
You’d think, with half of southern Europe literally on fire, our political leaders might finally be starting to take the climate emergency more seriously. But, thanks to a small electoral upset in Uxbridge, the opposite appears to be true, with both Labour and the Tories seizing on the unpopularity of London’s ultra low emission zone (ULEZ) to start talking down net zero and other environmental policies. Last week’s Times even ran, seemingly without irony, the splash headline ‘Tory retreat from green policies to woo voters’ directly next to a picture of British tourists fleeing wildfires in Rhodes. Forget Don’t Look Up – here was a case of Don’t Look Two Centimetres To The Right. Talk about fiddling while Rhodes burns.
Meanwhile, Grant Shapps – who, somewhat laughably, holds the office of Secretary of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero – plumbed new depths of political hypocrisy by tweeting how the successful Tory candidate for Uxbridge had “shown that we can send a powerful message on Sadiq Khan’s #ULEZexpansion”.
Except… a Department for Transport letter from 2020 reveals that “urgently bringing forward proposals to widen the scope and levels of [ULEZ] charges” had been specifically demanded by the government as part of Transport for London’s new funding agreement. And the secretary of state making the demand? One Grant Shapps. Awkward.
Finally, just a few brief words on the Nigel Farage/Coutts banking affair:
NO. BODY. CARES.
Until next month…
Read more from Paul every month in the Cambridge Independent.
