England, I did not know what love I bore thee

Out one day in the Lake District, the poet William Wordsworth was wandering lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills when, all at once, he saw a crowd…

Not last year, he didn't. Crowds were pretty scarce in Borrowdale and Ravenstondale and Eskdale this time last spring. In fact, Wordsworth and his like wouldn't even have been allowed to go wandering. The fells were off limits because of foot-and-mouth disease.

A year ago this month, foot-and-mouth was beginning to tighten its grip on the countryside - just as the Government was losing its. One knee-jerk reaction followed another. The countryside was declared "closed", then "open" and then "open in parts". Confusion reigned, set against a bleak backdrop of burning cadavers (of the creature kind). As one hotelier said later: "It was like being in a war."

One year on, world events and a real war have diluted the memory of our domestic disease. Diluted it in most regions, but probably not Cumbria. In Cumbria, the business scars will take a little longer to heal, although out of adversity has come some progress.

There has been no official public inquiry into the foot-and-mouth epidemic, but there has obviously been a lot of private soul-searching and, more importantly, an eagerness to learn lessons from the crisis, particularly at operator level.

This has certainly been the case in the Lake District. Here, spurred on by the co-ordinating activities and support of the Cumbria Tourist Board (CTB) and the newly created Lakes Hospitality Association (LHA), hotels have had to embrace the principles of marketing like never before. It is clear that those businesses that survived the severest downturn in occupancy for 30 years are those that used the crisis as an opportunity to seek new customers and discover ways to keep attracting existing ones.

It is a strange irony that, in many cases, the toughest trading environment for a generation has brought out the best of hospitality in terms of innovation and creativity.

The other spin-off of the crisis was the willingness of associations such as the CTB and LHA to work more closely. A co-ordinated approach is better than a fragmented one, and the model set up in the Lakes should be continued and followed elsewhere.

Finally, and this point has been made before, the foot-and-mouth crisis did, at least, bring hospitality and tourism to the forefront of Government thinking. It is easy to be cynical about this, but it is no coincidence that the latest backing-Britain-abroad campaign pays more than lip service to the inbound tourist industry. There's £40m on the table.

Perhaps the Lake District can use some of that money to attract the Japanese for the Peter Rabbit centenary this year. Even if it doesn't get that opportunity, Cumbria (and Devon and Galloway and all the other areas badly hit by foot-and-mouth) should remember the lessons learnt last year and keep the marketing momentum going.

As Wordsworth would have observed, the crowds, the hosts, will soon be wandering beside the lakes again.

FORBES MUTCH
Editor
Caterer & Hotelkeeper