Tourists 24/7 365 days a year..

Blackpool?

we have a camp site here, and at times there are queues in the fish and chip shop on a friday

we also have mass amount of new builds
so just more people generally.
i do miss how it was before - i think its natural to miss the peace

In Edinburgh there are hardly any people living in the Royal Mile or the closes off it because they are all Airbnbs. Just look at the number of keysafe boxes on the walls to let people in.

Well the simple fact is that you either have to suck it up, or leave. No one is going to ban tourists, so you have to deal with the situation in front of you.

My dad used to live in a tourist town but there were other towns and villages nearby that didn't get the same foot traffic. Maybe you could just move a few miles down the road?

Hopefully Edinburgh city council will use the 5% visitor levy sensibly to deal with the extra costs of accommodating millions of tourists.

Skye is the absolute worst. An island with 12,000 inhabitants is overrun with a million tourists a year. Massive issue with campervans, traffic, antisocial behaviour

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlwj7z7481o
https://nypost.com/2024/09/02/lifestyle/popular-tourist-spot-is-total-chaos-with-cars-stuck-in-4-hour-traffic-jam-horrific-experience/
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/travel/skye-joins-barcelona-list-places-destroyed-mass-tourism-113985 (and that was 2017 and has got worse since then)

All because many tourists are like total sheep and do the same route as a billion others - Edinburgh - Loch Lomond - Glencoe - Fort William - Skye - Inverness - Edinburgh.

"Add that to the students (a significant proportion of whom treat Cambridge as their own personal theme park, rather than a real city with real residents) and it makes actually living here a bloody nightmare a lot of the time..."

The students in Cambridge have earned their right to be there. They have as much right to be there as other residents, who just happen to have moved there. It's the oldest and most famous university town in the world (with Oxford). You can't really complain about students in Cambridge 😁

YANBU to leave if you no longer like it.

But I'd suggest visiting somewhere like Blackpool which has lost nearly all it's tourist economy and see whether you'd wish that on your area.

Basically the whole country i live in is like this, as winters get warmer peak season is extending april to november then another rush for xmas/ny and its intolerable. Can’t move around anywhere.

Then we get the joy of everyone telling us to suck it up because tourists are the only thing holding the economy together, which is really comforting as we’re missing three buses in a row to work and all our affordable housing is air bnb

You moved to a desirable area and now resent other people who want to see the city where you were once a visitor.

Overtourism a global problem and I'm not sure what anyone can do about it, unless destinations start introducing controls on numbers or something. And unless each of us never goes anywhere, we are all part of the problem too.

My hometown is very historic but by the late 90s, many of the old buildings were being demolished to make way for "modern" shopping malls etc, the core historic area was saved in the nick of time by gaining UNESCO World Heritage status. This was great of course, but it has culminated in massive loud crowds (cruise ship-loads), queues of Instafluencers clogging up every pavement and alley, tons of AirBnBs, crappy tourist-trap overpriced food stalls taking over where locals used to eat, locals being priced out of living there, very unsympathetic overdevelopment in the surrounding areas by developers looking to cash in on the halo effect...

On the other side, recently we were on holiday in another country that DH had been for work before some years ago. DH was telling us about a particularly interesting historic area of the city, said "it's very peaceful and atmospheric" - well, it wasn't and we couldn't walk anywhere without being in some Instafluencer's shot, the local residents had to have volunteers walking around with signs in multiple languages asking people to keep the noise down. But of course, we were also part of the problem!

There is a corner in Cambridge city centre, and there is a display in a window of a big shiny gold pendulum thing with an insect on top, showing my ignorance now because I really should know what it is. 🤫 Anyway, the tourists love it, taking photos. They walk backwards into the road, dozens of them, whilst traffic is trying to get through. Crazy.

It's the Corpus Christi clock. Looked it up. Every day's a school day.

I lived in a tourist town for a few years and yes, it was wearing. But everywhere else I have lived, the town centres have become run down and depressing, full of vape shops and down-and-outs smoking weed. It's hard to win.

I can only think, if you can afford it and circumstances permit, live somewhere affluent but not touristy.

Move to Wigan to remind yourself that there are worse things that can happen to a town centre than too many tourists in an economically successful location? Or just move somewhere generally ugly that nobody wants to visit?

I live nearby and you’re not wrong. I don’t have an issue with tourists (or students) as they prop up the local economy. It’s when they roam in large groups and don’t seem to notice the world beyond the end of their own nose. They take up all available space on pavements etc and act completely entitled. As you say, they just get chucked off the bus with no supervision and left to roam. I’ve been shoved out of the way by more than one group when walking with my mobility aid.

As PP have mentioned, shops start to cater for this audience and not the locals. Cambridge is terrible for shopping anyway but we really don’t need that many Harry Potter themed gift shops. Especially not when it was filmed in Oxford!

I sympathise to an extent about the increase in the number of tourists all year round in some places.
However I live in a large town which is not attractive to tourists. The centre has hardly any shops, facilities such as parks are overgrown and neglected and places of interest closed down or threatened with closure because of lack of funds. the place looks scruffy and the centre has hardly any shoppers.
Be grateful for the money that tourists bring.

Similar here. Great for part time jobs, jobs for students etc but annoying when they park terribly, block driveways etc but the good over rules the bad. Would be worse if totally shut down over winter.

When we lived in Notting Hill, there were Instagram and Tik Tok people outside the window probably 80% of the time. I used to just wave and make sure I had clothes on. My cats were in so many videos they were semi-famous (according to DD). They quite enjoyed the attention actually!

I'm sure it's the same for people in the Cotswolds. The houses are so pretty, people want to look through the windows.

We are all tourists somewhere, so just go with it.

Tourists bring money. Be grateful. Said as someone who lives in London so is constantly surrounded by tourists.

If you want to see what your town would look like without tourists, visit a little mining town in the depths of the Welsh valleys where there are no buses, no shops, no investment in parks, streets or infrastructure, no jobs, no services. It’s dire and young people leave.

I live in a ‘trendy’ SE seaside town. We are very busy April - September, busyish the rest of the year and completely tumbleweed dead in January and February. It’s busiest right now but I tend to adjust my errands and outings to off peak times to avoid crowds. If I have to go out when it’s busy I know all the shortcuts and sneaky parking spots! I popped my kids out at 10am to their summer clubs and it was really quiet, but my guess is it’ll be a lot busier at pickup later.

I don't really mind the busy times, most of our friends and neighbours do what we do and head to the beach in the morning or at teatime, if you go then you’ll see lots of local families with our kids and their boogie boards.

I actually find Jan/Feb hardest. It’s depressing to walk down the street and nothing is open with the freezing wind howling off the harbour.

But I lived in London for fifteen years and every day here is still preferable to all my days there,

I don’t think you are being unreasonable. Just trying to go about daily life when the supermarket looks like it been raided by locusts. There are no parking spaces even going to the chemist is a nightmare. Noise slamming doors screaming and shouting. Second home owners who lock the places up all winter so there is no affordable housing for locals. Litter on the beaches, water restrictions for residents but full swimming pools for the tourists. It wasn’t like this before Covid and I resent it too a lot. It’s like an invasion and I think you are entitled to feel like that 🥰

I recall in Cambridge starting to cross a one way street, all clear and stepped out into the path of a cyclist going the wrong way. Apparently the HIghway Code doesn't apply in Cambridge.

I stay very centrally in Edinburgh and I'm dreading August. Especially now due to the fire busses are a nightmare 😫

This.

Tourism supports local businesses which leads to local jobs.