A new chapter in Dorset tourism? (From Bournemouth Echo)

A new chapter in Dorset tourism?

8:30am Friday 16th October 2009

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THE publication of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, the third novel in Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, has the city of Stockholm braced for another wave of literary tourists, all eager to take in the atmosphere popularised in the books.

It’s the same in Ystad, a pleasant town on the country’s south coast, where tourists in search of Wallander, Sweden’s answer to Inspector Morse, swarm regularly into the area.

On the other side of the world it’s fair to say that without the author Alexander McCall-Smith, and a certain Precious Ramotswe, the beauty and personality of Botswana may have gone unappreciated for decades. As it is, since the publication of his engaging and furiously best-selling No I Ladies’ Detective Agency books, tourist visits have nearly doubled.

So, in these recessionary times, when all our assets must be made to pay, could we be missing a trick here in Dorset? Are we ignoring the literary pound?

The biggest problem is trying to quantify just exactly how much money Thomas Hardy, Enid Blyton and John “French Lieutenant’s Woman” Fowles are worth to the county.

Academic Joakim Lind calculated that the total value of Wallander to Sweden could be around £250 million euros.

No official figures exist for Thomas Hardy, the man who welded this county to the literary map but Mike Nixon, Secretary of the respected Thomas Hardy Society, is willing to have a go.

“One of the things we as a society have been discussing with the local council is the fact that Hardy really is the only truly internationally-recognised personality from Dorset,” he says. “If you think about it, there are not many people with his stature who are known all over the world; we have members in America and Japan.”

Mike says that around 16,000 visits are made each year to Hardy’s cottage at Bockhampton and another 10,000 visits are made to the author’s other home at Max Gate. If everyone paid the quoted entry fees, that adds up to £86,000.

Then there are all the add-ons. “We have calculated that around 20 per cent of all tourist visitors to Dorchester, which features in many Hardy novels, happen because of the Hardy connection,” he says.

He adds the value to the town can be seen in hotels booked, cafes used and shops patronised by the Hardyonistas.

In addition the Society holds around six events a year and a biennial international conference. The next one is in 2010 and will attract nearly 200 visits from across the globe.

“An illustration of the importance of Thomas Hardy to the local economy is that when I became secretary, I joined the Chamber of Commerce here,” he says. “It’s really hard to quantify how much money he has brought into Dorset but I feel it would be fair to say that he has been worth millions. He may have died in the early part of the last century but in a way, he is still working, still earning for Dorset.”

Another dead author who is still earning her crust is children’s writer Enid Blyton. Her book sales to date are calculated at a conservative 600 million. Given that most of these books have a Dorset connection – she owned land here and holidayed on the Isle of Purbeck – you can practically smell the commercial opportunity.

And Viv Endecott has. A Blytonite to her core, Viv runs two Blyton-themed enterprises, the Ginger Pop shop in Corfe Castle and the Illustrated World of Eileen Soper on Poole Quay, which showcases the work of the woman who drew the pictures for the Famous Five and other books. According to Viv: “So many of the people who come to this area, especially Corfe Castle, come because of Enid. One Australian lady told us that this area was their first stop in Britain because of Enid Blyton.”

Viv says Blyton’s financial worth to Dorset is; “unquantifiable” and her pulling power could be “bigger than Thomas Hardy” if people were to be allowed to exploit it.

So who else is doing the literary business? Well, the sight of Meryl Streep standing windswept and lovelorn on Lyme Regis’s Cobb, in the film version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman certainly upped visitor trips to the town.

Fans of TE Lawrence still beat a path to his home at Clouds House and those who love Minette Walters can hardly have failed to notice that many of her books are set here.

At Bournemouth’s Miramar Hotel, they still get visitors taking tea and the time to appreciate the fact that Hobbit and Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien spent a lot of time there. Even though they don’t even mention it on their website. But they do mention Hardy...

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