Brits get front-row seats to reopened London

The closing lines of William Wordsworth's poem composed upon Westminster Bridge on Sept 3,1802, may have described an early morning scene in London more than 200 years ago.

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; and all that mighty heart is lying still!

But for the last 14 months, the novel coronavirus pandemic has made 21st century London a much quieter place than the one millions of workers and visitors are used to.

As this period of docility moves closer to its end with the latest stage of lockdown lifting, the economic lifeblood of tourism pumping through London's veins once again will be all-important.

The third stage of lifting lockdown curbs started on Monday. Among other measures, the easing allows people to hug each other and enable pubs and restaurants to serve customers inside.

With international travel so limited though, local authorities hope this year it is domestic visitors who will fill the city's streets as a major campaign is launched under the slogan Let's Do London.

"Tourism is one of London's top three economic areas, and in a normal year London receives about 52 percent of all overseas visitors to the whole of the United Kingdom," Bernard Donoghue, the mayor of London's culture ambassador, said.

"International visitors usually outspend domestic about two to one, but as we won't have them in meaningful numbers this year, we want London to be the destination of choice for Britons."

The importance of tourism to London is huge, with visitors from China playing an evermore significant role as their numbers and expenditure grow. Figures from the mayor's office showed that in 2019, there were around 574,000 Chinese tourists to London, spending 862 million pounds ($1.2 billion).

Importance of tourism

The fact that Mayor Sadiq Khan launched the Let's Do London initiative as soon as his recent reelection was confirmed underlines tourism's importance in the city's reawakening.

"Visit Britain has done public sentiment surveys around the world, and London and the UK score very highly as places people are keen to come back to, and also as places where they feel safe, not only because of the success of the vaccine program, because Public Health England says there hasn't been a single case of coronavirus transmission at a UK visitor attraction in over 14 months," said Donoghue.

"That bodes well for the sector's long-term recovery. We expect to see visitors from Europe returning in September or October, which is when Visit Britain will resume international marketing, and we think Chinese visitors will pick up again around Lunar New Year time," he said.

London hosts the world's largest Lunar New Year celebrations outside Asia, "but this summer is about domestic tourism".

Last summer's briefly lifted lockdown also gave grounds for hope. "When things opened up last year, there was a clamor to return to places we love or had forgotten about," said Donoghue.

"People realized how much they loved museums and galleries when they were taken away. When they reopened, there was a tsunami of love toward them, as demonstrated by the number of people who retained membership of organizations."

Lockdown saw many venues resort to imaginative ways to maintain their profile, often online. This led to what Donoghue called "an explosion of creativity".

Agencies contributed to this story.

julian@mail.chinadailyuk.com