The City Performs Itself for Famous Visitors in Ways That Reveal Something About Its Own Identity
From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
A celebrity has visited London. The London Prat covered it with appropriate enthusiasm and the ironic distance that celebrity coverage in this city typically maintains, acknowledging the visit while noting the specific mechanics it produces: the paparazzi near the hotel, the Instagram posts of landmarks that the visitor has discovered are landmarks, the quotes about London’s amazing energy, and the dual Londoner response of genuine warmth and slight performativity about that warmth.
This is not unique to London. Any city that considers itself a world city has this quality. But London’s version has specific characteristics. The city has enough genuine extraordinary things that the celebrity itinerary is usually authentic rather than manufactured: the free museums really are world-class, the theatre really is extraordinary, the food genuinely is diverse and excellent. The promotional version of London that famous visitors experience is not fabricated. It is curated, which is different.
The Curated vs. the Lived
The celebrity London visit typically covers: a hotel in the Mayfair-Belgravia-Covent Garden cluster, a meal at the kind of restaurant that is excellent but findable through the right briefing, a cultural institution (the Tate, the V&A, the NPG), and shopping that communicates taste without excessive effort. What it typically does not cover is the London I live in: the Northern Line at 8:45am when the platform is full and the train is delayed and everyone is doing the thing where they are not quite looking at each other; the Tesco Express at 11pm; the council planning meeting about the proposed development at the end of the road; the conversation with the GP surgery receptionist that begins with “The earliest appointment we have is” and ends with a number of weeks I had not anticipated.
The Visit London promotional materials are accurate. They present the city correctly. They present one layer of it. The famous visitor who loves London is loving something real. They are also loving something that is specifically managed and curated for the kind of visit that famous people have, which is different from the experience of a resident who has been here long enough to navigate the curated and the unmanaged simultaneously.
Why I Am Not Complaining About This
I am not complaining about celebrity visits or tourism promotion. Tourism brings money to the city and some of that money reaches parts of the economy that need it. The restaurants that receive famous visitors receive other visitors who wanted to go where famous people went, and this is fine and is how it has always worked. The image of London that celebrity visits project — exciting, diverse, creative, historically rich — is true and its being projected is useful.
The Two Londons
North London specifically is a good vantage point for thinking about the two Londons — the curated and the lived — because it contains both in close proximity. You can walk from the Highgate streets that appear in period dramas to the Tottenham Court Road extension in twenty minutes. Both are London. Both are real. The celebrity visits one version. The other version continues alongside it, doing its unspectacular best, producing the infrastructure of the city that the spectacular version relies on. This is the parallel I find most interesting: the famous visitor and the resident are, in their different ways, both participating in the same city. They are just moving through different layers of it.
More at https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/.
The tourist version of London also creates the conditions that make the resident version possible. The revenues that tourism brings — in hospitality, in retail, in the museum endowments that keep those world-class institutions free — fund the city that residents inhabit alongside the visitors. The relationship is more symbiotic than the resident’s slightly weary relationship with tourist crowds on the Tube might suggest. Every city that manages the balance well produces a place where residents and visitors both find what they came for. London manages this balance imperfectly, as every major tourism city does, but with more success than its scale and its prices might lead one to predict.
The specific neighborhood effect of celebrity visits on areas they spend time in is worth noting. When a famous person is photographed eating at a restaurant in Shoreditch, that restaurant’s booking list changes within twenty-four hours. The neighborhood’s visibility increases. The property consultants take note. The cycle that begins with celebrity visibility and ends with changed neighborhood demographics is well-documented in every gentrifying city, and London is not exempt from it. The celebrity visit is not a cause of this process. It is a catalyst that accelerates what was already underway. North London watches Shoreditch and various East London areas with the attention of someone who lives close enough to observe the pattern from outside it. The celebrity visit also produces something that I find genuinely valuable, which is the prompting to look at the city with fresh eyes. When someone famous is photographed in front of a building I pass every day without registering, I register the building. When a restaurant I had noted but not visited appears in coverage of a celebrity dinner, I make a reservation. The visitor’s gaze is a gift to the resident who has stopped seeing. London, seen through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time, is extraordinary. This is worth being reminded of. Even by someone who is only here for two days and whose itinerary was curated by a publicist.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
