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Time series analysis of daily room occupancy rates in 91 hotels in England from January 1992 to December 1994 is used to analyse within‐week occupancy performance in the English hotel industry. Two major temporal patterns are identified: one features a midweek peak and Saturday sub‐peak; the other features a broader weekend peak and midweek trough. Both are represented in the occupancy profiles of most hotels. They are used to define a two‐dimensional daily occupancy performance space. The positioning of hotels within this space is explained in terms of location, market and other characteristics of the hotels, in a stepwise regression analysis. The implications of the findings are discussed in a marketing context.

IN devoting this number of The Library World in the main to county libraries, we shall not, we think, be guilty of producing what the journalists call “stale matter.” There was a time when county libraries appeared to dominate all small meetings of librarians and even appeared to obsess conferences; a new thing always creates in its advocates and workers an enthusiasm which, to some, appears to be out of proportion. We say “appears to be” because many town librarians felt that their own work was being by‐passed and occasionally belittled. Cooler minds, however, realised from the beginning that the first stages of county library development were as acorns from which oaks would inevitably grow. Few movements have the social importance that the county libraries undoubtedly have. Speaking from the librarianship point of view, it can now be said that the county libraries have proved themselves. The service as yet is uneven, as is inevitable; the movement began and grew in times of great stringency; and even those who advocated it, and it may be those who financed it, did not see its full possibilities. Growth will continue and in time the county library movement will be as fully organised as that of the great city libraries.

Urban areas whose dominant economic activities are those of providing an array of recreational services to tourists normally reflect this specialization in their land use patterns. Although precise statistical definition of the relative importance of recreational functions within an urban economy has certain inherent difficulties, some towns are so obviously dependent on tourism that they are universally recognized as resorts. In these towns, a characteristic urban morphology is apparent. Their unique physical qualities, so readily observed in the basic urban structure of resorts, may provide students of the science of tourism with insight into their function. Function and form, in tourism as in other urban activities, are, necessarily, closely interwined. ‘The landscape of a town, or if the word is accepted, the “townscape”, is worthy of far more geographical research than it now receives.’ The objective of this paper is the description of this interrelationship as observed in a representative American seaside resort, together with a brief historical interpretation of urban development in this resort.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how engagement with a healthy tourism “offer” could improve place perceptions through the development of collaborative strategies to promote a well-being destination.

This paper takes a constructivist grounded theory approach drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with local members of the council from public health and tourism teams, in a seaside town in the South of England.

Study findings indicate that the historical roots of the town’s creation have a bearing on the current planning challenges and strategies. Findings confirm that collaborative strategies to engage with a healthy tourism “offer” will improve place perceptions and promote a well-being destination.

This paper concludes that strategies to engage with a healthy tourism offer include interventions to curb alcohol consumption, regenerate areas and promote eudaemonic well-being – which could ultimately improve place perceptions.

This paper proposes that the development of strategic alliances bridged through the construct of well-being could improve place perceptions and promote a well-being destination.

“Seaside standards and culture patterns have now reached such stages of refinement that it is possible to judge a man's status, tastes, and income by the beach he attends…”. Some of the most intensive and highly specialized recreational land use exists along the ocean beaches of northeastern United States, providing a great range of social group appeal. In contrast to the essentially extensive recreational land use patterns of the rural, resource‐oriented parks and forests under Federal or state control, the development of these intermediate and user oriented recreational facilities, frequently resourced‐based, has been accomplished primarily through private enterprise operating in urban areas.

This chapter considers young people’s experiences of inequality as being unemployed in a small seaside town in the United Kingdom which has high levels of deprivation. It draws upon qualitative data from a study undertaken with 52 young people aged between 16 and 24, undertaken in 2015, to examine the impact of the economic recession on their lived experiences of seeking work and poverty. All the young people who participated in the study stated that they wanted to work but that there simply were not jobs available for them to do. What work they could find was often poorly paid, temporary and involved travel which they could not afford. The financial sanctions imposed on them by the Job Centre resulted in extreme hardship, hunger and homelessness. Often the young people talked about various forms of crime including drug-dealing and drug-taking as a way of dealing with the consequences of unemployment.

Over the past 15 years, there has been a growing interest in the potential of movement-based artistic practices for exploring aspects of the urban experience. As a visual artist and a geographer, I have become increasingly interested in how the movement-based practice of performative walking might be used as an ‘inventive method’ for examining and understanding aspects of how we live in cities.

In this chapter, I draw upon the insights gained from four recent projects to explore performative walking's potential as a mode of enquiry. These projects were conducted in and around Edinburgh, Scotland, between 2016 and 2019. Each project was designed to create an affective ‘friction’ and enhance participants' sensitivity to space and place through practices such as hyper-slow walking, repetitive walks, walking in the dark and creating spaces for imaginary games. The projects demonstrated to me that performative walking can help uncover emotional and hidden geographies by combining, and bringing to bear upon these spaces, the visual, sensory, historical, mythical, remembered, personal, projected and, importantly, the imagined.

I conclude that performative walking is a valuable form of research which should be given parity with other forms of urban inquiry, such as public consultations, in dialogues about our future cities. Furthermore, I propose that attempts should be made by those interested in developing ‘inventive’ methods in urban inquiry, including those interested in developing creative geographies, to evaluate more systematically the contribution that performative walking might make to ways in which we understand, and develop, our cities.

When a problem with underage drinking in the seaside town of Hastings was highlighted by an analysis into public place violent crime, the local community safety partnership ‐ the Safer Hastings Partnership ‐ turned to 175 local young people to ask them directly about their experiences and perceptions of underage drinking and antisocial behaviour. The findings were both enlightening and concerning, but have enabled more effective enforcement activity and have led to local young people themselves using the findings of the consultation to develop educational resources targeted at their peers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine urban destination marketing from a mainly practitioner standpoint, though one of its principal observations is the gap between theory and practice; while the former is premised on related notions of difference and competitive advantage, in practice the greater part of urban destination marketing eschews competitive advantage, resulting in a pervasive marketing of “sameness”.

The paper is in three parts. The first set out the urban tourism context in respect of historical, market, supply, impact and definitional/measurement dimensions. Part two profiles the bespoke delivery mechanisms established for urban destination marketing, examining nomenclature, core purpose/mission, status, size and finances, as well as overhead and operating parameters.

The final section comprises a state-of-the-art review, setting out a five variable model of purposeful urban destination marketing, concluding that “good” in urban destination marketing is atypical and currently in Europe is confined to only a handful of European cities.

This paper is intended to give the reader a better understanding of why, in such an important field of human endeavour, success is so problematic. It hopefully gives pointers to practitioners and academics as to how best in future there can be more winners and fewer losers, so that increasing numbers of towns and cities maximise the impact locally of the world's largest industry and at the same time become “known”.

SEPTEMBER is the month when, Summer being irrevocably over, our minds turn to library activities for the winter. At the time of writing the international situation is however so uncertain that few have the power to concentrate on schemes or on any work other than that of the moment. There is an immediate placidity which may be deceptive, and this is superficial even so far as libraries are concerned. In almost every town members of library staffs are pledged to the hilt to various forms of national service—A.R.P. being the main occupation of senior men and Territorial and other military services occupying the younger. We know of librarians who have been ear‐marked as food‐controllers, fuel controllers, zone controllers of communication centres and one, grimly enough, is to be registrar of civilian deaths. Then every town is doing something to preserve its library treasures, we hope. In this connexion the valuable little ninepenny pamphlet issued by the British Museum on libraries and museums in war should be studied. In most libraries the destruction of the stock would not be disastrous in any extreme way. We do not deny that it would be rather costly in labour and time to build it up again. There would, however, be great loss if all the Local Collections were to disappear and if the accession books and catalogues were destroyed.