Somewhere in your head there is a map. It has the Lake District on it, and the Cotswolds, and probably Cornwall at the bottom. It has Edinburgh as the obvious Scottish city, and maybe St Davids or Snowdonia if you're feeling Wales-y. You didn't draw this map – you absorbed it, from adverts and school trips and the way your parents talked about "getting away". But someone did draw it, quite deliberately, in the early 1970s. In an office somewhere, with a budget and a deadline.

The British Tourist Authority and its regional cousins were conjured into existence by the Development of Tourism Act 1969 – still, remarkably, almost the only piece of legislation Britain has ever passed that formally defined tourism as a thing worth governing. Before that act, "the British tourism industry" was a bit like "the British cloud industry": it existed, people participated in it, but nobody had sat down and written it into law. The act changed that. It created official regional tourist boards, gave them money, and handed them an interesting problem: which places, exactly, were they supposed to promote?

The Boundary Drawers Get to Work

This is where it gets quietly strange. The boards had to divide Britain into promotable regions, each with its own identity and its own pitch to the public. Some of those boundaries followed geography reasonably well. Others were almost entirely invented – lines drawn around clusters of attractions that happened to fall within a board's administrative territory. Once a region was packaged and marketed, the infrastructure followed: the visitor centres, the brown signs, the hotel investment, the coach routes. And once the infrastructure arrived, the habit formed.

A place that found itself inside a well-funded tourist board's remit in 1972 got half a century of compound interest on that initial attention. A place just outside the boundary – equally beautiful, equally interesting – got passed over. It's still getting passed over now, because the habit of overlooking it has become invisible. It just feels like somewhere people don't go.

The Destination That Felt Natural (Wasn't)

This is the thing worth sitting with: a "destination" feels like a fact about a place, as though Cornwall is obviously a destination in the way that it obviously has a coastline. But destination-ness is an achievement, not a geography. It requires someone to decide, fund, sign, route and repeat until the idea sticks. The Lake District didn't become the Lake District purely because Wordsworth wandered lonely – it became the Lake District because institutions kept pointing at it and saying "here, go here" for long enough that going there started to feel instinctive.

Which means the places not on your mental map are not necessarily less worth visiting. They just had a worse meeting in 1972.

Next time you find yourself booking somewhere obvious and feeling like you chose it freely, spare a thought for the quango cartographers who coloured in that particular square first.

FAQ

What was the Development of Tourism Act 1969?

The legislation established tourism as an area to be managed in Britain. The act created the British Tourist Authority and the official regional tourist boards, gave them a budget and then allowed them to decide on areas to promote. The article describes it as almost unique among legislation of this type.

How did regional tourist boards decide which places to promote?

Britain was divided up into a number of regions and each given a ‘brand identity’ and ‘promotional theme’. The boundaries between regions were often based upon geography, but were also often the result of administrators drawing lines on a map between clusters of tourist attractions within an administrative area and then allocating funds and attention accordingly.

Why do some beautiful places get overlooked by tourists?

Areas just outside the well-funded boundary of a tourist board are frequently ignored at the initial stages of development and therefore miss out on early investment and attention. The visitor centres, brown signage, hotels and coach routes follow the marketed regions and therefore the tourist’s habit of visiting said areas develops elsewhere, and over time the neglect becomes invisible and it simply feels like nobody goes there.

Is a tourist destination a natural fact about a place?

A destination is not a geographical feature; it’s an achievement on the part of an institution or group of people that have decided to ‘promote’ a place or region, and to fund, signpost, route and repeatedly advertise it until it becomes second nature and an instinctive place for people to visit. The example of the Lake District and its ongoing promotion by institutions for years and years until visiting it became second nature, not just because of Wordsworth, is a case in point.