Goathland is the main filming location for the Yorkshire Television series Heartbeat, which has instigated a very large increase in visitors to the village, and given rise to certain symbolic conflicts that orbit around a contestation between Goathland’s traditional identity as a quiet moorland ‘community’ and its virtual identity as Aidensfield in the television series. The residents of Goathland are very anxious about this and advocate strategies of tourism management and control that are founded on an ideological construction of authentic ‘rural life’ in which they have culturally and economically invested - both in terms of local property ownership and lifestyle preferences. It is residents’ stated views on the cultural politics of ‘ Heartbeat tourism’ that provide the empirical grounding for the article. Conceptually, the emphasis is on exploring the performative cultures and processes that construct and contest the meaning of place within a tourism context. This approach not only examines the ideological underpinnings of what residents say but reveals the spatial practices they reflexively construct as a form of praxis. Finally, it is argued that many of the so-called tourism impacts experienced by Goathland residents are about wider cultural and economic dynamics manifesting as localized spatial conflicts which are not revealed by uncritical research methods or readily available to a managerial or technical fix.

In this paper I consider a recent case of tourism in the village of Goathland in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park. Although tourism is a long-standing phenomenon in Goathland, over the last few years its nature and impacts have altered in such a way as to cause considerable concern for the resident community. The main catalyst for this change is the fact that Goathland is the filming location for the Yorkshire Television series "Heartbeat", which has not only instigated a manifold increase in tourist numbers to the village but has also heralded a marked shift in the way the local environment is consumed by these visitors. By drawing primarily on the results of qualitative research, where interviews were held with tourists, residents, and key informants, I outline and discuss the value judgements contained within the production and consumption of tourism in Goathland, and carry this analysis onto notions of tourism impacts as voiced by respondents. Furthermore, I link these responses to wider concepts, such as the production and consumption of Englishness, heritage, the rural idyll, country lifestyles, and nostalgia to illustrate how these concepts inflect the local tourism process. p

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This paper analyses the relationship between dramaturgy, tourism and rurality. Through an ethnographic study of Goathland in North Yorkshire -the filming location for the UK television drama series "Heartbeat" -the rural is shown to be a cultural performance that invokes certain lifestyle preferences that are both reliant upon and counterpoised to urban society. However, when urban viewers exchange the virtuality of television viewing for the corporeality of visiting the rural scenes that have become a familiar part of their cultural landscapes, the consequences are much more profound, nuanced and complex than the demarcation of positive or negative impacts reified in certain managerialist discourses. Moreover, the paper shows how the public and private spaces of the rural are being fundamentally transformed by the types of global consumption and mobility that "film-induced tourism" represents.

Purpose In recent decades western cities have slowly evolved to extend their cultural offer to “the postmodern mixing of public and commercial culture” (Richards, 2014, p. 120) as a major plank of urban regeneration and development strategies. Urban tourism has been central to this and tourists are now an ever present temporary population of cultural consumers in so many of our towns and cities, even in those industrial cities that until recently would not have been imagined as tourist places. Tourism is thus a part of everyday urban life (Urry, 2002) whether we gaze on tourists going from one cultural space to another in our home towns or whether we ourselves are transformed into tourists as we conduct our cultural consumption in places distant to our usual workaday lives. This research note considers the impact such consumption is having on our urban centres. The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect on the way our urban centres are managed, who the urban citizen now is, and in what direction could tourism research take to shed further light on the way we manage, create and reproduce urban life in the increasingly diverse postmodern city. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a critical reflection on urban tourism and offers a future research orientation. Findings The argument is that in light of new mobilities urban tourism research needs to be more politically reflexive than it often is. Research limitations/implications There is no empirical research content so this does not apply. Practical implications The practical implications are that urban tourism research should be about making cities better places and not simply about being policy performing vehicles in a politically light sense. Originality/value The originality of this piece is in the way it mixes urban studies, social theory and tourism studies together to come out with a view and argument on a way forward in researching tourism and cities.