Using Heritage to Promote Rural Places

The proliferation of brown signs informing people
they are entering a ‘historic market town’, ‘historic
riverside village’ and so on has become an everyday
feature in the UK. This reflects the growing use of
local heritage in its various guises to promote places
as tourist attractions; and this in turn can be seen as a
manifestation of the broader commodification of place.
The ‘historicising’ of place both reflects and
reproduces an interest in the past and in the
particularities of places. Such place promotional
efforts have a long history, particularly within an urban
context, but are increasingly deployed in what might
be seen as more mundane places, including villages
and small towns seeking to project themselves
through reference to some local historical or cultural
features that distinguish them from other places,
thereby marking them out as somewhere worth
visiting.