Catherine Cookson Country: Tourist Expectation and Experience

The paper reports the experience of tourists on organised group travel to Catherine Cookson Country, a newly-created image-region on South Tyneside, based around Britain's most popular fiction writer whose novels are all set in the area. Visitor expectation is largely realised, for a majority of tourists are Cookson readers and group travel to Tyneside has further bonded them in a spirit of pilgrimage. A Cookson Trail with directed viewing and commentary by locally-trained guides, concluding at a Cookson museum, produces an overall experience of 'staged authenticity ' Expectation is a crucial component in the experience of place. For everywhere but home place, a range of secondary sources constitutes pre-visit knowledge or expectations which influence the actual encounter, a process which is brought into sharp focus with tourism and tourist 'destinations'. A variety of world-wide destinations or localities are projected by different media. While such projected image geographies provide a valid study in their own right, the relationship of image to reality in the experience of place is more complex and open to differing interpretations. Boorstin (1964), for example, labelled the tourist world as one of pseudo-events and inauthentic experiences. MacCannell (1973, 1989), on the other hand, considered that all tourists embodied a quest for authenticity, even though the result might be a 'staged authenticity'. Crick (1988) has recently endorsed this concept by arguing that all cultures are 'staged' to the extent that they are invented, remade and their elements reorganised. This paper presents a brief case study in support of 'staged authenticity', illustrated with reference to a particular category of tourist, a group motivated by the writings of a modern, living regional novelist. Britain is rich in its literary landscapes. Many a novelist or poet has set his or her work in a particular region, a topic well-acknowledged and discussed by writers themselves (eg. Drabble, 1979) and by literary critics (Daiches and Flower, 1979), as well as by geographers (Gilbert, 1960; Pocock, 1978). In recent decades the link between author and town or countryside has been emphasised by such general publications as the Oxford Literary Guide (Eagle and Carnell, 1981), by particular celebrities presenting 'their' region (eg. Herriot, 1986) and by the English Tourist Board, both in its general coverage from Constable to Wordsworth Country and in its numerous place-specific leaflets. Dr. D.C.D. Pocock is Reader in the Department of Geography, University of Durham, Science Laboratories, South Rd., Durham, DH1 3LE.