Abstract
The Lake District Visitor Centre at Brockhole provides a focus for tourism in the Lake District National Park. The house and gardens were created in the 1890s and the thirty acres of gardens were designed by the landscape architect, Thomas Mawson. Brockhole was built as a result of the railway, which opened up the Lake District to tourists and wealthy industrialists who commuted weekly into Manchester. Brockhole has been a family home, convalescent home and most recently a visitor centre. It’s view (and over-view) of the Lakeland fells and its multiple incarnations means that Brockhole is a site fundamentally connected to past and present tourist performances in and of ‘Lakeland’. Brockhole is to be developed as ‘a world class visitor attraction’, a process which may involve the demolition of the house and will necessarily reform its tourist framing of the Lakes. This is occurring in the context of the 2006-2030 strategy document, A Vision for the Lake District National Park in 2030. And how to realise it, which addresses the management of the Lakes as a living landscape. In this paper I reflect on my own visits to the lakes and to Brockhole in this climate of change. I consider the view from Brockhole, the perspective that is (and that will be) offered on the Lakeland landscape. I argue that Brockhole provides a critical point from which to consider multiple viewpoints on the staging and re-staging of ‘living landscapes’ in the Lakes. I reflect on Victorian versions of travelling ‘up’ to and of living in the lakes (experience, imaginings, writings, ownership, travel). I consider Brockhole as a point in and on space, one that in 1890 was introduced and which, shortly, will be re-introduced, with the potential of reinscribing myths of place, distance and the past in and on the landscape.