The Cultural Economy of Landscape and Prospects for Peripheral Development in the Twenty-first Century: The Case of the English Lake District

Abstract

A brief characterization of the cultural economy of landscape is provided, with special reference to the English Lake District. The early growth of tourism in the Lake District in relation to its natural, literary and artistic assets is described. I examine the cultural economy of landscape in relation to three critical social groups, namely, local producers of goods and services, residents and visitors/tourists. I then offer a detailed account of the main elements of the Lake District's cultural economy and the tourist experience today. Attention is devoted to (a) the natural environment and its attractions, (b) the historical-artistic patrimony of the region and (c) the growing importance of food production, cuisine and crafts within the regional economy. I show how these elements of the cultural economy combine with a complex institutional milieu to generate a path-dependent trajectory of development. In the conclusion, I present a few remarks on the concept of creative regions and the senses in which peripheral areas like the Lake District might and might not be analysed in terms of this concept.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Elizabeth Currid for her helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

The term “compage”, although obsolete, is particularly apposite to my purposes, for it conveys directly the sense of a system of formally conjoined elements. A somewhat analogous and less contrived term is “platform”, but this has already been specifically appropriated in the literature to mean a geographical framework for the management of innovation (cf. Asheim et al., 2007; Harmaakorpi, 2006; Lazzeretti et al., 2010). This meaning overlaps with but is not identical to the way in which I employ the term compage. The compage idea was first introduced in geography by Whittlesey (1954), who used it to designate a unique but open-ended assemblage of regional relata, though few if any subsequent scholars appear to have pursued this notion further.

The current county of Cumbria was formed in 1974 by amalgamation of the old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland together with the Furness and Cartmel Districts of Lancashire and a small area of Yorkshire around Sedbergh.

We might say of the mountains of the Lake District, as Blanchard (1925, p. 212) says of the French Alps “Si elles offrent le spectacle d'une nature restée farouche, elles n'en sont pas moins des montagnes éminemment humaines” (“If they offer the spectacle of a still fierce nature, these mountains are nonetheless eminently human”).

A similar recursive process can be identified in the landscape of Hollywood (Scott, 2005).

For more general accounts of the effects of film on the choice of tourist destinations, see Hudson and Brent Ritchie (2006), Riley et al. (1998), Tooke and Baker (1996).

www.lake-district.gov.uk.

The Good Food Guide defines a score of 4 as a “dedicated, focused approach to cooking, good classical skills, and high-quality ingredients”.

Sedbergh is actually located in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, but is nonetheless contained the county of Cumbria.