Intellectuals' Tourist Town: Hay on Wye

 The Intellectuals’ “Tourist Town”: Hay on Wye

 

When does a place deserve the epithet “Tourist town”? It can’t just be because many visitors come. London, Paris, New York and other major cities attract millions of tourists – but they are not tourist towns. Too much non-touristy stuff is going on, such as industry, commerce, finance and government.

 

There’s obviously no formal definition, but perhaps this can be agreed: if a place thrives wholly or mainly on the money of visitors, it is likely a tourist town.

 

Some cities that were once great centres of power, trade and military dominance are now, after decline or conquest, tourist towns because of their rich heritage. Venice is the prime example, dependant on the vast cruise ships that wera away its venerable foundations.

 

Other places become tourist towns because of their fortunate locations – by the sea (Costa del Sol), up mountains, or near some exotic natural or man-made site. In most cases this has been a gradual process, the pace dictated by ease of travel and increasing disposable incomes.

 

Thus little fishing ports, even though they may remain fishing ports, are gradually transformed by second homes and holiday accommodation, or, in some countries, are blighted by high rise hotels and apartment blocks.

 

Seldom is a tourist town willed into existence. But such is the case with Hay on Wye. This ancient market town on the English-Welsh border is beautifully positioned on the River Wye and surrounded by steep hills and deep valleys.

It would always attract a good number of people who like to hike, bike or canoe. But until the second half of the C20 it was a declining market town with an interesting history of border conflict and failing communications (its railway being ripped out in the 1960s).

 

Then one person repurposed Hay. This was Richard Booth, a rich young local landowner, who decided, for reasons I’m not interested enough to explore, to turn Hay into a place famous for second-hand books. He established his bookshop empire (“Kingdom”, he actually called it) by collecting books in large bulk from closing US libraries and shipping them to Hay. Somehow he successfully marketed Hay as THE centre for books; other retailers and antiquarians grabbed his coattails and book history was improbably made.

 

Hay had started to become a “tourist town” – but for tourists of a bookish bent…What next?

 

Next was another step up in Hay’s reinvention as a place of intellectual pilgrimage: the Hay Festival, described as a “literary Woodstock”. That eventually led to the associated but independent How The Light Gets In sub-festival (in Hay) – a festival devoted to philosophy in a wide sense. (It also tours to Kenwood at the top of Hampstead Heath in London.)

 

Remote Hay is now the perhaps unique as a tourist town for “intellectuals”, all created by entrepreneurial effort, rather than the processes of history, or nature.

 

Hay’s nearest comparator, of a completely antagonistic sort, might be Bicester Village, near Oxford. Its cut price designer outlets (no bookshops, no philosophy) make it a manufactured tourist town for fashion bargain seekers, mainly from the Far East.

 

Being now a tourist town, Hay now presents expensive boutique shops and steepish prices in hotels, both for rooms and sundries (£4.75 for a litre of bottled Welsh water..), and vast carparks to swallow the transports of festival goers (no train).

Even though Hay is now an undisputed tourist town of a special sort, local life and traditions go on.

 

St Mary’s is the Anglican Church (Church in Wales). A hybrid building from medieval to C19 times, it stands steeply above a small brook that flows to the Wye just to the north of the church.

 

We were waiting in the churchyard to meet a group of friends when the parish priest (it’s a high Anglican church) came out, on his way home. He wondered whether we wanted to go inside the church, now closed. We said maybe tomorrow. He then told us about the parish’s latest project. In the summer they will take the church’s statue of Mary on a voyage  down the Wye to Hereford and its cathedral.

Mary will make several stops along the way. The noble object of this watery pilgrimage is to raise awareness and money for the Cleansing of the Wye. This is not about driving sin or heresy off the river, but fighting pollution.

 

May 2022