‘It’s not that we like death or anything’: exploring the motivations and experiences of visitors to a lighter dark tourism attraction

ABSTRACT

This paper explores motives for visiting a lightest dark (heritage) tourism attraction. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 24 visitors to the London Dungeon. Few visitors reported an interest in death, suffering or the macabre as important in their decision to visit, a finding which accords with research at a range of other types of darker places. Instead, most people visited from general or incidental reasons that were unrelated to the attraction’s theme. However, while few visitors stated that an interest in learning was important in their reason for visiting, many reported that an element of informal education and discovery was an important part of the visit experience. As such, lighter dark tourism is about more than entertainment and the London Dungeon offers opportunities for visitors to engage with the themes and stories in a deeper way. Overall, these findings suggest that lightest dark tourism has more in common with heritage tourism than at first appears.

KEYWORDS:

• Lightest dark tourism
• motivations
• informal learning
• edutainment
• London Dungeon

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Steve Blackburn, manager of the London Dungeon, for permission to interview visitors. We would also like to thank those visitors who agreed to take part in our interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Preslava Ivanova was an undergraduate student at Bournemouth University between 2012 and 2016, where she completed the BA (Hons) Tourism Management degree. During her time at university, she took particular interest in studying the topics of heritage and dark tourism and has a long-standing interest in visiting such sites. She currently works as a Commercial Aircraft Charter Broker at Chapman Freeborn Airchartering.

Duncan Light is Senior Lecturer in Tourism in the Department of Tourism and Hospitality, Bournemouth, University, UK. He has long-standing research interests in heritage tourism, particularly the relationship between heritage and (national) identities. He is the author of The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State in Romania (Routledge 2016).