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Today, Plymouth and its environs stand abandoned and frozen in time, looking like the set of an apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Behind the locked gates prohibiting entry into the “Exclusion Zone,” a deep drift of mud, lava and ash almost buries the clock tower of the former courthouse and rises to the upper stories of other buildings, prompting descriptions of a modern-day Pompeii
(Bachelor, 2014).
Introduction
The city is an emblem of modernity. It is a landscape of opportunity and main point of departure and destination for tourism. Globally, the city trip has seen soaring growth between 2007 and 2016 to represent 22 per cent of all global holidays. In Europe, by 2014, city trips had grown to represent some 20 per cent of all holiday trips. The ITB World Travel Trends Report 2015/2016 (ITB, 2015, p. 25) reports that, “(i)n 2014, Europeans made nearly 70 million city trips to international destinations, a 60 per cent rise on 2007 which corresponds to 7 per cent per year, and booked about 400 million overnight stays”. In the UK, ABTA (2013) records a rise in the popularity of the city break as opposed to the beach holiday, from parity of 41 per cent of all tourism in 2013, to 53 per cent city breaks vs 38 per cent beach holiday by 2016 (ABTA, 2016, p. 4). Typically, the majority of tourists on city breaks have similar motivations to each other: “sightseeing, enjoying the city atmosphere, shopping, eating out, and visiting cultural attractions” (ITB, 2015, p. 24). And yet there are some tourists motivated to seek out places of death and disaster, referred to as “dark tourists” if it is considered to be a contemporary late to post-modern phenomenon (Lennon and Foley, 2004), or “thanatourists” if it is held to be a more embedded human practice stemming from the Christian obsession with death (Seaton, 1996, 2009). A controversial term (unhelpful, sensational, and not politically correct [Bowman and Pezzullo, 2009]), one critiqued (from supply or demand [Biran and Poria, 2012], or psychological perspective [Buda, 2015]) and typologised (placed on a slippery continuum [Stone, 2006; Hepburn, 2012]), “dark tourism” has the potential to drive niche tourism in some of the world’s most visited cities – “dark cities” according to Kennell and...