Overtourism as revealed preference
Homage to Catalonian urban design
Tourists are quite annoying. This feels especially true in London, where we don’t have very wide pavements; we never needed grand avenues to move armies around and therefore they’re not well equipped to deal with entire classrooms’ worth of Italian teenagers. No offence to Italian schoolchildren.
Westminster is especially overrun, and in August can be maddening. I’m not sure if it’s getting worse, or if I’m just getting crankier, but walking through the area can start to feel like getting through the crowds at Carcassonne. I accept that in grumbling about this I’m like one of those people who moves to Soho and complains about the nightlife, but it’s still annoying.
I can never decide whether we should ban tourists from Parliament Square altogether by cordoning it off, or just give up on the Palace of Westminster (which is falling apart anyway) and turn the whole thing into a tourist site; get some out of work actors to play Parliamentarians in front of Chinese visitors, the way that Romans used to watch Spartans cosplaying as members of their ancient assembly.
However much Londoners might resent the visitors, it’s nothing compared to Barcelona, where I’ve just been on a city break, admiring the architecture and generally being an annoying tourist; getting in people’s way on the metro because I don’t know how to work the ticket machine, gawping around outside all the obvious Gaudí spots along with about a million other people. That sort of thing.
I last went to the Catalan city with my then girlfriend around 2005 and two decades later I returned with our daughter (along with some of her friends and their dads). Barcelona became hugely popular in the early 2000s, as the British embraced city breaks with great enthusiasm, thanks in part to the genius of Michael O’Leary. Overnight, everyone seemed to be talking about the place, and visitor numbers to the city doubled in the first few years of that decade.
Today it’s the fifth most visited city in Europe, and with good reason. Barcelona has a beautiful aesthetic, heavily influenced by Paris but also by Gaudí’s unique bohemian genius: wide pavements filled with restaurants and cafes, those distinctive grids with seven or eight story apartment buildings lined with balconies especially designed to kill British tourists. (As an aside, I wonder if one reason that they have never been popular in Britain, apart from the weather, is because too many people would fall off while drunk.)
