Olivia Skjervold

“England”: as Seen on TV

Riding a bus to the Lake District I watched the landscape to the left of the road drop away to reveal a view of the  quintessential English, wide, rolling green hills. From Peter Rabbit, Jane Eyre, and Masterpiece classics, the phrase “imagine England” is practically synonymous with the nation’s countryside. Just like tea with milk and sugar or rainy weather, pastoral landscapes are something most travellers expect to encounter during a tour of England. All of us on the bus took out our cameras to photograph the misty landscape, dotted with grazing sheep and criss-crossed with stone walls. I heard someone in the seat behind me say, “it looks just like the movies!”. They were right. Aside from the occasional piece of modern farm equipment or satellite dish, the bright green hills that unfolded in front of me were remarkably unaltered from the image I had already formed in my mind of the countryside based off of PBS period dramas and Hollywood movies of fantastical feudal villages.

I remember once when I was in High School, I met an exchange student from France. I asked her what she thought of America and if it was hard to adjust to a place so far from home. She answered saying that adjusting hadn’t been as hard for her as she thought it might be. She explained that she had been exposed to a lot of American media and pop culture throughout her life, making America almost feel familiar. I remember being slightly put off with the idea that so much of American culture could be summed up simply within Hollywood movies. However, I’ve found myself finally understanding the sentiments that exchange student described as I began to tour around England. Having seen depictions of “England” throughout countless movies, paintings, storybooks and TV shows, I had formed my own image of what England was supposed to be like. This version of England existed completely within my imagination and I did not expect any of it to match my expectations in reality. However, upon arriving here, I found bits and pieces of this imagination were indeed real. The crumbling Scarborough castle sat right on the cliffs like something right out of a fairy tale, the peaceful countryside, the mist, row houses, and cobbled streets all out of cinema. Upon visiting these places, they came out of imagination and into reality.

Of course, only fractions of England matched these cinematic expressions, but the English tourist industry seems to have caught on that the imagination is powerful marketing tool. The heavily costumed tours of York Chocolate Story, Haunted Ghost walking tours, and the Jorvik Centre are examples just within the city walls of York of heritage sites that offer highly theatrical interpretations of history. Often humorous and even bordering on cheesy, the iterative approach to history does seem to be a great way to spark a visitors’ interest in the site. I will admit, after learning that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was inspired by Whitby Abbey, I was much more inclined to see it. I have not even read Dracula myself, but I had enough cultural context for the story for it to exist in my imagination. Upon arriving and touring the Abbey, the site was able to take on a life of its own. Having an imaginative context for the Abby allowed my experience there to be relatable, the pictures I took already connected to a place in my imagination. The same was true for the moors outside Haworth. After having read works by the Brontë sisters, walking along the hillsides became a much more personal experience knowing that the same views had inspired such famous writers.

I found it interesting that outside of London, the Lake District was one of the most heavily visited “tourist” areas of the United Kingdom. It seems correct that after the global urbanization of London, tourists next come to the green spaces of England seeking the “traditional” England.  Tourists want to see the places that harken back to their imagined ideas of England, often of Beatrix Potter or even J.K. Rowling. These places aren’t really real but the authors behind them based them off of real places. Fiction comes out of reality and then becomes that reality. Sometimes it can be hard to tell where the fiction ends and reality begins. While I was in Whitby, I walked up a long set of stone stair cases to the church that perched on top of the cliffs. The church was surrounded by rows and rows of old, jagged headstones, worn away by years of salty wind. Just behind the church, the Abbey was visible. Along the side of the staircase was a very steep road, with deep ridges of stones protruding from the road like speed bumps. I learned from a guide at the Abbey that those ridges were there to keep the carriages that carried the heavy coffins up to the church from sliding backwards back down the steep incline. This morbid detail seemed like just the kind of thing to belong to the place that inspired Dracula.  

It could be that England itself is a theatrical place. The constant rain and mist adds a certain level of cinematic gloom and mystery that I haven't found matched in the Midwest. Stepping out for long walks in the rain has not hindered my enjoyment of traveling abroad because I expect rain and fog from England. As nice as it would be for there to be sunshine and gentle breezes every time I went out on a day trip, I know I would feel cheated that I was missing out on the “real” England.

There is a danger to this kind of romanticization of a place. As entertaining as being swept away with you imagination is, it doesn’t capture the complexities of a place that you can’t imagine.  Whitby is a real place that can’t be reduced down to fish and chips and vampires. It’s real, with a long history filled with real people who lived out their real lives there until their very real deaths. If movies really could accurately replicate the experience of being someplace else so old, saturated with culture and history, nobody would leave their sofa. The real satisfaction of traveling some place new doesn’t come from maintaining an illusion of an idyllic fantasy world but from witnessing the cultural and physical nuances of a foreign place.

Whitby Abbey, inspiration for Dracula

Whitby again