Welcome to our new ‘Sharing Insights’ blog series, offering a unique opportunity to demonstrate the skills and expertise of some of our academics at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU)- opening new avenues for communication with businesses and a broad range of stakeholders.

Creative placemaking is extremely important in the modern world, underpinning the vibrancy, resilience and experiential aspects of locations for visitors and communities. An innovative aspect of creative placemaking is magical tourism. Let me explain. Magical tourism involves travelling to visit places associated with magic for reasons including stories, fanship, worship and renewal. Its wide-scale relatability, growing popularity, green roots, use of illusory technologies, inclusive approach and associations with wellness make it an important subject today’s world and a considerable contributor to the experience economy. My co-author Nitasha Sharma and I have been recently developing this important new tourism niche.

Magical travels can be traced back through millennia. People have long visited ancient courts to practice astral magic, or riverside shrines for worship, or made pilgrimages to seek out ritual items and magical texts in far-flung libraries. However, people have often hidden their magical beliefs due to the intolerance of society. More recently, magical tourism has moved into the mainstream (note the popularity of fairy trails, fantasy festivals, and please don’t forget the green man emblem on Charles III’s wedding invitation). This is a process that that was accelerated by the release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film and the continuing popularity of magical and fantasy TV and films such as The Witcher, House of the Dragon and Rings of Power.

The popularity of magical tourism affects us in a variety of different ways. Tourists visiting historic cities and sites are often already familiar with the heritage built environment through multi-media encounters with cos-play, gaming, films and novels. While some destinations such as New York make us feel like we are stepping onto a film set, medieval historic sites like Canterbury are intermingled with our ideas about fairytales: consider the tropes of looming castles, ivy-covered ruins, or Gothic gateways leading feelings of “magi-heritage” – a term coined by Lovell in 2017. Visitors now travel to encounter the fantasy atmosphere of Game of Thrones in addition to the historical facts about the past.

We are additionally drawn to places connected with stories, for example, myths, legends, and folklore. We visit sites associated with fantasy authors and locations that are said to inspire them, for example, the lamppost and “wooden” door, framed with faun carvings, in Oxford, on which the author CS Lewis based several icons of his Narnia series. Mysteries also pique our interest and we are drawn to fairy forts in Ireland, to stone circles and to places that are associated with the unexplained, and with ghosts and legends. When mysteries are absent, sometimes the tourism industry, including major organisations like English Heritage, invent ghost stories in order to create added mystique! Places, from stately homes, to town centres frequently also use light festivals and trails in the winter months to return us to the age-old feeling of storytelling around the fire and enchant audiences with seemingly impossible building transformations and effects. We seek a sense of wonder.

The popularity of this new trend is also connected to a wish to return to our deeply green roots. Wellness practices centred on how we connect to the planet led to the fast-growing trend in forest bathing activities, which encourages a more mindful relationship with nature. Magical festivals like the 3 Wishes Fairy Festival in Somerset and The Green Gathering are increasingly gathering traction in today’s magic-friendly market, when people often wish to learn how to do things sustainably, to draw on the local mythologies and folklore of the community. These events can involve the celebration of traditional customs and magical rituals, for example making a wish and hanging it on a wicker structure which is then burned.

In conclusion, it is increasingly important to understand this burgeoning tourist market which includes new and “silver” fantasy fans, families, Millennials, Gen Z and to ask question such as “how magical is my visitor attraction?” Nitasha, myself and others can help you with that calculation, perform an audit and advise on how to work with the local community to develop the mystique of your tourism, hospitality or events business.

BIO

Dr Jane Lovell has arts and tourism development knowledge, after 10 years working at The Royal Opera House followed by 6 years at Canterbury City Council as Tourism Development Manager, whether she undertook both capital and strategic projects. She lectures in events design and production, creative destination management at undergraduate and postgraduate level and has published widely on the subject of heritage tourism and experience, film locations, storytelling and magical tourism.

To discuss potential collaborations where your project may intersect magical tourism, please get in touch with Jane at jane.lovell@canterbury.ac.uk.

Get more information:

University Profile: Dr Jane Lovell – Canterbury Christ Church University

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LinkedIn: (22) Jane Lovell | LinkedIn