A Weekend in Winchester: The under-tourism trend of visiting the towns nobody goes to
I don’t know about you, but if I can manage it, I like to spend time planning and travelling to places I want to visit, but for most of it, I read books to satiate my hunger and watch a lot of YouTube videos.
Travel content is easily one of the most popular YouTube genres; whether you’re looking for some inspiration for a weekend city break or want to know everywhere you need to eat in Hong Kong, there’s something for everyone.
Whether you’re looking to visit famous hotspots or somewhere a little off the regular tourist trail, there’s always something to scratch your itch. However, in recent years, we’ve seen the rise of a new alternative style of travel vlog, something we’re going to coin, ‘under-tourism’.
Under-tourism is about visiting and appreciating the world’s lesser-known locations, the humdrum towns and quiet villages, the places that kids grow up desperate to leave when they finish school. Under-tourism doesn’t care about your Instagram grid, it doesn’t care for LED-covered, ultra-modern skyscrapers, and it doesn’t care about grand buildings wrapped in historical significance. It is about the mundane, finding beauty in the everyday and realising that every small region on this planet of ours has a story to tell.
In many ways, it feels like under-tourism is the antidote to our ever-growing-smaller, ever more polished world. When you visit a city like Barcelona, you’ve already seen every nook and cranny on your TikTok feed, and you already know which landmarks you need to nonchalantly pose in front of because you’ve seen them on your ‘Explore’ page.
We’ve all got a bucket list for places we want to visit before we kick the bucket, but some of them are bound to be underwhelming, the reality not matching what you’ve seen before. You dreamed of finding solace over a matcha in the calm, tranquil Kyoto you saw online in 1080p, but in reality find yourself shoulder-to-shoulder with thousands of others, kettled into small roads, surrounded by fridge magnets and chopsticks with cherry-blossom print. That first pizza in Naples doesn’t quite hit the same when you’ve seen the cheese-pull on social media, and the small, family-run restaurant you saw on your commute looks more like a kebab shop at 02:00 in reality.
Whether it’s a weekend in Winchester, exploring Exeter, having a recce of Roubaix or investigating Ingolstadt, there’s something novel, even refreshing, about people visiting these less popular places. Both in terms of the content we consume and the places we want to visit, we’ve wised up, and going to the mega-cities, the national parks or visiting one of the Seven Wonders of the World, will always have its place, but they often feel, at best, familiar, or at worst, artificial.
These small towns offer us a value for money that you simply can’t get in major tourism hubs now, where most people are trying to rip you off or sell you a piece of tat to remember your time visiting. You can walk without bumping into tour groups or teenagers filming themselves dancing in front of landmarks, and, most importantly, enjoy a very real and fulfilling experience of getting what you see.
Every town has a story that’s important to its existence, and the people who live those lives deserve to be heard and interacted with, regardless of them not being the cultural zeitgeist that are London, New York or Paris. So next time you’re opening up YouTube, why don’t you do me a favour, search your hometown and see what the under-tourists make of where you grew up.
