Londoners urged to reclaim their summer streets

Post-lockdown tourism to be relaunched with the focus shifted to domestic visitors

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; and all that mighty heart is lying still!

The closing lines of William Wordsworth's poem Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, may have described an early morning scene in London more than 200 years ago, but for the last 14 months, the novel coronavirus pandemic has made 21st century London a much quieter place than the one millions of workers and visitors are used to.

As this period of docility moves closer to its end with the latest stage of lockdown lifting, the economic lifeblood of tourism pumping through London's veins once again will be all-important.

But with international travel so limited, local authorities hope this year it is domestic visitors who will fill the city's streets, as a major campaign is launched under the slogan Let's Do London.

"Tourism is one of London’s top three economic areas, and in a normal year London receives about 52 percent of all overseas visitors to the whole of the United Kingdom," Bernard Donoghue, the Mayor of London's culture ambassador, told China Daily.

"International visitors usually outspend domestic about two to one, but as we won't have them in meaningful numbers this year, we want London to be the destination of choice for Britons."

The importance of tourism to London is huge, with visitors from China playing an ever-more significant role, as their numbers and expenditure grows.

According to figures from the mayor's office, in 2019 there were around 574,000 Chinese tourists to London, spending 862 million pounds ($1,209 million).

The fact that Mayor Sadiq Khan launched the Let's Do London initiative as soon as his recent re-election was confirmed underlines tourism's importance in the city's reawakening.

"Visit Britain has done public sentiment surveys around the world, and London and the UK score very highly as places people are keen to come back to, and also as places where they feel safe, not only because of the success of the vaccine program, because Public Health England says there hasn't been a single case of coronavirus transmission at a UK visitor attraction in over 14 months," said Donoghue.

"That bodes well for the sector's long-term recovery. We expect to see visitors from Europe returning in September or October, which is when Visit Britain will resume international marketing, and we think Chinese visitors will pick up again around Lunar New Year time," he said. London hosts the world's largest Lunar New Year celebrations outside Asia, "but this summer is about domestic tourism".

Last summer's briefly-lifted lockdown also gave grounds for hope. "When things opened up last year, there was a clamor to return to places we love or had forgotten about," said Donoghue.

"People realized how much they loved museums and galleries when they were taken away. When they reopened, there was a tsunami of love toward them, as demonstrated by the number of people who retained membership of organizations and venues, even when they couldn't visit them.

"In fact, the lack of overseas visitors means cities will do well because this summer, for the first time in ages, they'll be quieter than usual, so it's a rare opportunity for locals to see London with no queues or crowds."

Lockdown saw many venues and attractions resort to imaginative ways to maintain their profile and keep revenue streams going, often online. This led to what Donoghue called "an explosion of creativity in online tours, curator talks, exploring archives and other such activities".

One example is the London Transport Museum, in Covent Garden in central London, whose virtual tours of abandoned underground stations have proved a popular and financial success.

"Usually we get about 400,000 visitors per year, with about 30 percent from overseas, a number that has been rising over the years," said Elizabeth McKay, the museum's chief operating officer.

"We've been very entrepreneurial and shifted away from physical tours we couldn't offer to a virtual alternative, which have been a massive global hit. We're a small museum, but our content links to the story of London, machines, art, design and architecture, so it has very wide appeal."

Coincidentally, a major digital overhaul was already planned by the museum when lockdown intervened, allowing it to push ahead with something that has helped it endure the last year, and which is likely to make a permanent difference.

"I think people will continue to enjoy these virtual tours after reopening", she said. "It's not either digital or a real visit. I think that in the future, museums will be about a blended experience.

"We think it's a two-year process and our mantra is recover, rebuild and reset. Last year we were only open for 10 weeks, and we got about 40 percent of the visitors we would usually have expected, which was better than a lot of places. It's not going to get back to normal in a hurry, but we will weather this storm."

Outside London, Donoghue is CEO of the nationwide Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, or Alva. He said feedback from its members showed that after a period of time like no other, 2021 was shaping up to be a summer and domestic opportunity like no other, before, hopefully, something vaguely like normal service could resume for global visitors in 2022.

"We've been doing public sentiment surveys at Alva, and we're delighted by the appetite of the public to go back to places they love and explore them in a unique way this year," he said. "But we know that as soon as people start to come back, and get more confident about things like using public transport, life will get back to a semblance of the old ways fairly soon."