Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

CONSTRUCTED BUBBLES

            We had been in Amsterdam for just a few days when our daughter-in-law suggested she take us on a day-trip to the ancient town of Utrecht. We’d never been there, so we accepted her invitation happily. My spirits sang as we drove through the countryside. Of course we were on a new, modern, multi-lane motorway. Of course there were signs of modernity around us as we whizzed along – wind-turbines and modern drainage systems. But the flat fields and the bare, deciduous winter trees with crows in them, and the occasional old farm-house and windmill all looked just the way 17^th century Dutch landscape painting said they would. The stuff of reverie.

But as we approached Utrecht, my heart sank. The outskirts of the city are a great, flat, anonymous plain, covered in big, box-like high-rises, some of them being apartment blocks but more of them being office blocks and company HQs with corporate logos on them. It was the kind of settlement that is plonked down in the middle of nowhere, looking like a child’s organisation of Lego blocks, blank and soulless.  Then we went through dull modern suburbs, clogged inner-city roads, and finally parked in a big, dark and noisy car-park.

A few streets away we entered “old” Utrecht – still a living and inhabited part of the city, with modern shops smelling of fresh wood and soap and cleanliness, and with cafes and commuters on bicycles, but nevertheless the traditional part of the city that we had come to see. It was centred on an old canal and the buildings were old-style Dutch, three or four storeys tall, even if re-purposed for modern life. So to a tour through the medieval Catholic cathedral of St Martin, which has been a Calvinist church since the Protestant Reformation, its great bell-tower now standing separate from the body of the cathedral ever since a great storm in the 1670s stove in part of its roof.

We spent four of five hours in “old” Utrecht, we delighted in it, we did the things tourists do.

But this thought kept nagging at me. We were not seeing the real Utrecht – the modern city where thousands of people actually work and live. We were seeing the small, unrepresentative part of Utrecht that had been preserved for tourists like us.

We had similar experiences later in our journey as we were driven into other cities. Of course Prague was for us the great castle and Wenceslas Square and the Franz Kafka museum and Charles Bridge over the Vtlava (Moldau) and St Vitus cathedral and opera at the Estates Theatre, not to mention that very spacious traditional apartment we rented just around the corner from the main old market square. But (apart from Wenceslas Square) this was not the modern city through which we were driven by taxi to and from the airport – the shabby fringes of the city, the repetitive suburban streets, the apartment blocks and the dull normality of it. Likewise our experience of Turin – a lovely apartment in a gated courtyard, within easy walking distance of the opera house, the Risorgimento musem, the church with the Shroud and other things tourists delight to see. But our night-time ‘bus journey from the airport had taken us through the most forlorn, industrialised graffiti-bombed outskirts of Turin, and the real city where most people lived.

You can see where I am heading here, can’t you? I could have detailed kindred experiences in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon and elsewhere, but Utrecht, Prague and Turin are enough to make my point. What tourists most often see and focus on, in any major city, are things that are not the norm, not representative of the local population’s real way of life. They are bubbles, abstracted from modern life and put on display. Any travel brochure, “holiday” show on television or blogsite devoted to travel and tourism really depicts an unreal world, a world of “highlights” and antiquities and treasures carefully conserved.

A constructed world.

And such worlds really are constructed. Later in our same journey, we visited our son in Yorkshire and walked the dales with him. He pointed out that all the modern houses around his town of Settle have to be built to a special code, to make them conform to the traditional look of the place. So even houses clearly having modern elements to them, such as steel window-casings, still have to be made from the same dull yellowy-grey stone [or its simulacrum] and have the same slate-grey roofs as the older houses. There is to this an element of “preserving Toytown” and allowing visitors to believe that a traditional way of life still continues here, undisturbed. Indeed, there are such building codes across the older parts of most European towns and cities. I recalled that in the spacious apartment we rented in the old city of Prague, we had to trudge up 88 stairs to our door because it is forbidden, in that area, to modify old buildings by installing lifts.

Is there any harm to this conservation of the ancient, or this recreation of the ancient? Not really, just so long as we never assume that in seeing the tourist spots we have really encountered a local population’s way of life. As for those who think that have “done” a city or country by looking only at its tourist spots – ah me, they must be the subject of another day’s sermon.

FOOTNOTE: This article was written and posted a week before news came that there had been a shooting in Utrecht killing at least three people. Of course no city is literally a bubble extracted from the world that surrounds it - but the phenomenon of the tourist bubble is still a reality.