England’s story is still here. Why are we so bad at selling it?

It was an aristocratic cultural education during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that still holds a place in the British imagination today.

To the rest of Europe, however, it meant ‘going to England’ - to learn about the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, as well as the country's relatively stable governance.

In the Age of Sail, ships from the Rhine delta made heavy use of the Haven Ports - Felixstowe, Ipswich, Harwich and Mistley - on England’s east coast.

Visitors would then follow an inland route encompassing London, Windsor, Oxford, Birmingham, Ironbridge, Stoke, Derby, Cambridge and Chelmsford, taking in ancient universities, and the country’s agricultural and industrial heartlands.

Yet while Italy’s Grand Tour remains alive and well-oversubscribed - to the great discontent of Venetians - the UK, though still an undoubtedly popular tourist destination, has lost much of its comparative allure - and with it its distinctive voice to the rest of the world.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century architects designed and constructed their buildings to speak to an international audience.

They curated a coherent story of the British Isles, promoting a Platonist outlook which they connected to prehistoric, Roman, early Medieval, Medieval and Renaissance heritage.

The embeddedness of these themes within heritage structures makes them usefully deployable as cultural assets.

Country houses, civic buildings, and other infrastructure play an active role today in preserving the lustre of Britain’s cultural identity and providing brick-and-mortar witnesses to a history that is open to interpretation and challenge.

Rather than hitting the heritage sector with funding cuts and tourist taxes, as is proposed, it may want to consider supporting the heritage industry.

Unlike many of the government’s efforts to kickstart growth and boost tourism, resurrecting the Grand Tour of England could be achieved at relatively little expense or effort.

Government endorsement of the Grand Tour of England would serve as a clarion call to the many heritage associations, organisations and independent experts in the UK who would willingly collaborate on such a project.

A revival of the Grand Tour of England would expand the tourist route beyond the UK’s congested ‘Golden Triangle’ of London, Oxford and Cambridge, bringing monumental economic benefits to the rest of the country.

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James Syrett is Co-Founder and Managing Director of country house and heritage consultancy Byrga Geniht.

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