No shirt, no shoes, no respect: Well dressed and well-behaved tourists only, please

With chaos at EU ports and airports, horrific wildfires in Spain and France and a continuing heatwave here, it is not surprising that there is a significant growth in holidaying at home.

At the same time, 2026 will see an all-time high in numbers of foreign visitors to the UK. This will all be a welcome relief for the hard-pressed hospitality industry and it is particularly important in the countryside, where tourism provides many of the jobs that have been lost in agriculture.

The Prime Minister’s welcome announcement of some rate relief for pubs won’t compensate for the huge increase in employment taxes, but it does suggest that the Government is beginning to understand better the importance of hospitality to well- being. Tourism now contributes £147 billion to the economy and provides one in 15 jobs. Its growth up to 2030 is likely to outpace the wider economy and international visitors will spend an additional £9.4 billion compared with 2024.

However, there are drawbacks, as protests against tourist growth in Spain and other traditional holiday destinations show. One way to avoid this is to encourage a wider range of destinations, otherwise the crush in Cambridge, York, Westminster, Edinburgh and the other front runners will become unbearable. It is only by taking tourism more seriously as a key industry that the benefits can be spread and the inevitable pressures reduced.

The countryside — its villages and market towns as well as its great houses and monuments — could play a more important part in this. There is so much more to rural England than the Lake District and the Cotswolds, beautiful as they are. We need to be better at telling a wider rural story, not only to those who come from abroad, but to our own people, holidaying at home.

What will be much more difficult are the more personal issues that need to be raised. It does seem wrong that so many who search out the prettiest of villages spoil the view for others by presenting themselves at their ugliest. The Bermuda short is suitable only for the youngest and slimmest of profiles, not broad-bottomed, overweight middle-aged men. Broadway in Worcestershire and Lavenham in Suffolk, Cornwall and the Yorkshire Dales are not enhanced by topless visitors in garish shorts and flip-flops.

Of course, no one is looking for out-of-date formality — few but the conservative London clubs would insist on ties or prohibit trainers — it is simply that places that draw us to visit because of their beauty deserve our courtesy in presenting ourselves as attractively as possible.

Ancient market towns and beguiling villages should engender respect from visitors, not what is too often something akin to invasion. Large groups march through, following someone holding aloft an umbrella, often without thought for other pedestrians and rarely making way for those walking in the opposite direction. There is much that tour organisers can do to make their groups more easily absorbed into the life of the places they have chosen to come to view, such as using microphones and earpieces instead of shouting.

Then there’s the backpack. It has become the universal means of carriage, yet its users seem unaware of the effect a laden one can have as they swing around, thumping their neighbours with abandon. Books of etiquette may be out of fashion, but as tourism grows ever more prevalent, those involved in the UK hospitality industry need to seek the simple politenesses which will help avoid the backlash that is increasingly widespread elsewhere.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.