IGU Regional Conference, Kraków, Poland
18-22 August 2014
IGU 2014 Book of Abstracts
IGU2014 – 0876
The Western Front: war heritage, contested interpretations and dark tourism
Miles S.
University of Glasgow
War has played an important, if uneasy, role in tourism as the places of conflict are elevated as
attractions. Battle sites, military buildings and installations and the location of military-related events
are all recognised as integral to the geography of war and its heritage. The emerging
scholarly discipline of dark tourism normally encompasses war sites within its definitions and there is
a growing awareness of such sites within the “dark” paradigm. This paper examines the Western
Front war zone of World War One (1914-18) in France and Belgium within the context of dark
tourism. This is particularly apt with the beginning of the centenary of the war in 2014 and the
predicted increase in tourism that the area will experience in the next four years. Extending over 460
miles (736 km) between the North Sea and the Swiss Border the conflict on the Western Front
resulted in the deaths of more than 6 million soldiers and another 14 million wounded on all sides.
The area has potent iconic significance in British culture and has been a byword for great suffering,
loss and futility (particularly the Somme which continues to have great symbolic power). It has,
nevertheless, a renewed importance for those who see the war as anything but futile and as a focus
to celebrate a victory which, at the time, was considered worth the cost. This paper will, mainly from
an Anglo-Saxon perspective, examine the Western Front as a dark tourism landscape as understood
from a supply-side definition of dark tourism. It will posit the question whether the Western Front
can be seen as “dark” particularly in the light of the varying uses the area has been subject to in
discourses surrounding history, memory and commemoration (both collective and personal). In
doing so it will examine the motivations and experiences of the visitors to the Western Front sites
and the different meanings they attach to it. In order to fully understand the
contemporary resonance of the area the way the sites are interpreted through tourist guides and
local agencies will be alluded to as well as the extent to which the heritage of the war is constructed
to satisfy contemporary tourist expectations. The way space has been recreated through the
construction of memorials, museums and reconstructed features is central to this. The lack of
tangible remains of the war in the landscape on many parts of the Front makes this a necessary
requirement for a tourist understanding of the conflict today. The paper challenges the contention
that because the site is “dark” therefore those who visit it are “dark tourists”. The Western Front, like
many heritage spaces, is used and interpreted in a number of different ways; visitors to the area are
as likely to be “grief”, “commemorative”, “memory” or “heritage” tourists as “dark” tourists.</p>