The impact of tourism on the Lake District, 1750 to 1850
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Lake District was considered a wild and uninhabitable region. People feared nature in its raw and mysterious form. Yet a hundred years later, it was being visited by enthusiastic crowds of tourists and artists, who saw in its mountains a northern Arcadia, the ideal of pastoral isolation. Landscape was no longer seen as something fearful, but as a fitting subject for a picture; and the Lake District was the perfect place to find such landscapes. Many of the early visitors were, like Gray, writers or artists, many in search of the “picturesque”.
As war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France made it impossible for the young aristocracy to travel abroad for the traditional Grand Tour, they began looking closer to home. By the late 1840’s, we see the beginning of mass tourism with the coming of the railway to Windermere. Now a day trip to the Lakes was a possibility for the Northern labouring classes.
There are many guidebooks, letters, and journals describing the experiences of the tourists, but what about the other side: what impact did tourism have on the Lake District and its people?
We will focus on three main centres — Keswick, Grasmere and Ambleside — and explore the economic, social and aesthetic changes over this period.
Wordsworth, in 1810, described how “through centuries till within the last forty years” those who lived in the Lakes were “a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists among whom the plough of each man was confined to the maintenance of his own family or to the occasional accommodation of his neighbour”.
This idyllic life was changing and, as we will see, one of the factors behind the change was the growth of tourism.
unknown etcher after
Thomas Allom (1804-1872), Grasmere, unknown publication
details, The Wordsworth Trust.