Bowness-on-Windermere is often crowded with tourists on warm days (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Beatrix Potter famously once said that “not even Hitler” could damage the Lake District, such is the enduring beauty of its rolling hills and natural landscape. But now locals fear their popular national park is under grave threat from an army of tourists causing irreparable damage – unless they are slapped with a controversial visitor charge to tame them.
Daytrippers and holidaymakers vastly outnumber the Lake District’s 40,000 residents, with 18million visitors a year descending on a 30-mile area – a higher tourist-to-resident ratio than Venice, Paris and Barcelona. With swathes of the landscape dominated by rural hills and mountains where not a soul can be seen for miles, the majority cram into tiny towns like Bowness-on-Windermere to enjoy breathtaking views. To Windermere and Bowness mayor Christine Hallatsch, it is “both a blessing and a curse” – with the economic boost of tourism tempered by litter louts, rowdy hen and stag parties, and traffic chaos.
Read more: The ‘overrated’ UK town with a population of 4,000 that’s loved by tourists
“There simply isn’t enough parking to accommodate all the people who want to visit by car on a sunny weekend,” she explains.
“When they arrive and find the car parks full, they don’t go home but just park illegally, possibly blocking access to homes and emergency vehicles.”
Increasing numbers of stag and hen parties have caused a “marked rise in antisocial behaviour linked to drugs and alcohol”, she adds. Last year, the problem got so bad that the town council was forced to employ its own street support officers.
At the same time, police objected to plans to turn a Bowness guest house into a bar, blaming a rise in licensed premises for a “significant increase in the amount of antisocial behaviour reports and violent crime”.
The number of public order offences officers dealt with annually in Bowness also shot up from 268 to 334 in just two years.
But Michael Hill, chief executive of Friends of the Lake District, says that while there is “definitely some irresponsible behaviour”, it is the “very scale of the visits” that has the most impact, rather than a minority of badly behaved tourists.
During peak summer season, he says “you’re much more likely to spend hours in a traffic jam than to get anywhere quickly in that area”.
Long queues often form for cruises along Lake Windermere (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Millions of litres of untreated sewage have also been notoriously dumped into the iconic Lake Windermere over the past few years, causing blooms of harmful blue-green algae.
“The problem is the wastewater infrastructure was designed for the resident population of that area,” explains Mr Hill.
“At this time of year, the number of people who are emitting effluent in this catchment is many, many times more than the number of residents.”
From 2020-23, a single pumping station dumped 140million litres of raw sewage into the lake, according to a BBC investigation. Another analysis reports there were 140 days last year when sewage was spilt illegally.
But Mr Hill says: “It’s not just the untreated sewage that causes the problem, although that is disgusting.
“Even the treated sewage has high levels of phosphates and other chemicals, which leads to problems in the lake.”
Lake Windermere has suffered badly from sewage discharges (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Mr Hill also warns that “communities are being hollowed out of locals”.
He adds: “Housing is under great pressure for local residents because it’s so attractive to buy holiday homes and second homes and put them on Airbnb in places like Bowness.”
That makes it “almost impossible for someone who works locally here to buy a house”, he says, with some businesses forced to close for part of the year because they struggle to find workers.
“We need as many people to come here and enjoy it as possible, but it needs to be done in a way that respects the area and landscape,” he adds.
Mr Hill believes a small visitor charge – similar to those in Edinburgh, Barcelona, and Venice – would help the Lakes “cope with visitor numbers and invest in infrastructure”.
Even a charge of just a few pounds, he says, could create a huge pot of money to fund improvements such as park rangers to uphold rules and increased bus services to help cut car traffic.
Not everyone backs a tourist tax. Steve Bavin, a Bowness district councillor, supports the crackdown on bad behaviour but says: “There are other things that would need to be put in place first for that kind of thing to work well.
“Also, I don’t want to exclude people. Life’s expensive at the moment. If you’re going to behave yourself and go for a nice walk somewhere, I wouldn’t want to charge you away and make it impossible for you to afford that. That wouldn’t be very fair.”
It would also put off some visitors. Warren Butterworth, 54, from Blackpool, comes to Bowness once a year for a day out in the summer. He thinks a tourist tax would “ruin things and stop people going away”.
Warren Butterworth does not support a tourist charge in Bowness-on-Windermere (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
But Mr Hill claims: “If you set it at a low level, and you make it clear to people that it is helping to regenerate and protect the area they love and make it a better visitor experience for them, they’ll do more than accept it – they’ll welcome it.”
Gill Haigh, chief executive of Cumbria Tourism, says the challenge has been consistency in tourist habits – with places like Bowness packed on hot summer days, but deserted in cooler, rainier weather.
She points out that the overall number of visits to Cumbria is 18% down on pre-pandemic levels, in large part because of seasonal fluctuations. Cruises along Lake Windermere have been down 20% since Covid.
“I think we accept that Bowness, of all the places in Cumbria that people come to visit, is the most accessible and popular for people,” she says.
“We know there are key days in the year where we’re really going to get a high volume of people.”
Cumbria Tourism works with the police, council and others on “key pinch days” to mitigate likely problems.
“The businesses themselves, I think, are incredibly responsible,” she says. “They have their own staffing and security that’s there to support around noise and the like.
“One of the businesses I’m talking to spent just shy of £1million in the last two years building accommodation for staff. Those staff then settle here within those communities.
“It’s a really popular place. It’s always going to be a place that people want to get to every part of and there’s a responsibility on all of us to work together to make sure people have a brilliant time, but they do that in a way that means everyone benefits.”
Local businesses have been praised for the way they help to manage the effects of tourism (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Mr Hill believes the problems are a feature of the “huge range of different visitor experiences” in the Lake District.
“You could be up on the remote high fells enjoying a long-distance walk and at some times of the year not see another soul,” he explains.
“But at this time of year in Bowness, you’re cheek to jowl with thousands of other people eating ice cream, taking steamer tours, going to the pub, and visiting the Beatrix Potter museum.
“Bowness is just at one end of that spectrum.”
Take a walk around Bowness on a sunny day, and it does not take long to see the problems Mr Hill and others describe.
Travelling from Barrow-in-Furness on a Tuesday morning, I had little option but to come by car because a bus would have taken an hour and a half.
When I arrived, many of the car parks were full and I spent several minutes driving around to find a space. I was lucky to find a spot in Glebe Road, but had to spend another 10 minutes queuing at the ticket machine.
Speak to holidaymakers, and they clearly value Bowness as one of Britain’s premier tourist destinations.
Alan Whittingham, 76, visiting from Altrincham, said: “It’s just a beautiful place and we’re very lucky.
“I’ve been to lots of places across the world, and there aren’t many that are on a par with it. It shows you can’t beat this country.”
Kevin Ersser, 57, from Bristol, said: “It’s really nice and old-fashioned but with lots of shops and all the mod-cons.”
I even spoke to Jassem Dala, 47, who had travelled all the way from Saudi Arabia to enjoy Bowness instead of the major UK cities like London or Manchester.
But pretty much everyone I bumped into was a tourist. Discovering a resident walking around the town felt like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Alan Whittingham says Bowness-on-Windermere is a ‘beautiful place’ (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Kevin Ersser says Bowness-on-Windermere combines the best of a traditional town in a modern setting (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Whatever people’s views of a tourist charge, it is hard to disagree with the core principle behind the idea – what Mr Hill describes as “regenerative tourism”.
He adds: “What that means to me is that as a visitor, you want to know that where you’re going will potentially benefit from your visit, and at the very least, you’re not doing harm by going there.”
Tourism is clearly a double-edged sword that brings enormous economic benefits to Bowness alongside social challenges.
Ms Hallatsch says: “We realise that having our population boosted by visitors is what enables us to have wonderful facilities in our town, such as a theatre, cinema, fabulous restaurants and cosy pubs, which our resident population alone could not support.”
Campaigners say Bowness-on-Windermere could benefit from ‘regenerative tourism’ (Image: Jonathan Buckmaster)
Ms Haigh adds that the Lakes “really, really, really need to have strong tourism and people coming, not just on the sunny days, but at different times during the year as well”.
The simple message for visitors seems to be that you are welcome in Bowness, but please at least leave things as you found them – so Cumbrian residents are not left to clean up the mess.