Wish You Were Here

Project overview

In recent years, protests have swelled against the effects of overtourism. These protests tend to focus on the effects of tourism on local communities and the environment with the voice of the often-vilified tourist rarely heard. This project seeks to find and preserve the voice of the tourist to Spain and to understand the historical value of the tourist experience. From the 1960s, millions of British workers first travelled abroad, and the majority to Spain, shaping life narratives of greater opportunity, self-development, and memories of treasured experiences. This project brings together university and community researchers to find the tourist voice through oral-history interviews, to harness creative arts to deepen participant engagement, and to engage public audiences with the valuable history of tourists’ experiences. The project brings together partners at the University of Leeds School of History with the Leeds-based community-arts organisation Skippko.

Project team

• Professor Peter Anderson, School of History, [email protected]
• Cath Brooke
• Skippko

Project outputs

ChapelFM Love the Words podcast about the project: Podcast

What are you hoping to achieve with your project?

Together Skippko, the community researchers, and I hope to uncover the voice and experiences of British tourists who travelled to Spain from the 1960s. We are particularly interested in their life narratives of greater opportunity, self-development, and memories of treasured experiences and how Spain changed from being simply a space on the map to them to a place invested with meaningful life events. The community researchers will produce a publication with stories and images to be distributed to local libraries and community groups. We will also produce an exhibition to bring the tourist voice and experience to a wider audience.

What are you most looking forward to in this project?

I am really looking forward to working with community researchers to uncover the treasured memories of people who enjoyed the excitement and novelty of travelling abroad for the first time to Spain.

What inspired you to develop this project?

Tourism to Spain represents a staggering social phenomenon. In 2024 around 94 million tourists visited the country with UK visitors helping to lead the way: in July 2024 alone over 2 million Britons travelled to Spain (over 18 million Britons in total in 2024). In historical terms, this massive movement across borders has happened extremely quickly and over the course of the 1960s the number of Britons who had enjoyed the chance to leave the country increased at a massive pace: of the record 4.6 million people who went overseas from the UK in 1965, one-third had never travelled abroad before. Most newly affluent British workers who travelled abroad went to Spain and in 1974 56 per cent of UK charter holidaymakers travelling Spain with the next biggest contingent, just 10 per cent, visiting Italy.

Despite the scale of this revolution, package holidays to Spain have rarely won a good press. Those with greater cultural capital have maintained distinction strategies which render holidays to Spain as socially inferior. One only needs to watch an episode of the TV comedy ‘Benidorm’ to see these class strategies at work. Historians more interested in political history, or perhaps working-class trade-union history, have also steered clear of studying tourists and the working-class culture that enveloped their holidays. This did not spring out of the blue and there is a long academic history of denigrating tourists as victims of manipulative consumer capitalism.

All of this means there is a terrible disjuncture between the powerful and positive experiences of tourists who gained new opportunities and the social history of the UK and Spain which has overlooked or disdained their experience. Accordingly, I wanted to find a way of unearthing the tourist experience and challenging both academic and social attitudes. I also wanted to do this in a way that worked with communities instead of working on communities and to develop an effective but innovative research methodology.

These desires led me to work with the community-arts organisation Skippko. Skippko has a long tradition of training community research teams and producing art work for exhibition which can help inform public debate.