Listen to Phil Smith's talk at the b-side symposium in Portland, Dorset in 2015:

Summing Up On Excursions
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Published: 2012
List Price: £12.00  Use code to save 20% 
228 pages
Size: 14 x 21.5 cm
ISBN: 978-1-908009-86-9
Tags: counter-tourism, heritage, wrights & sites, mythogeography, mis-guide, phil smith

Counter-Tourism: The Handbook
CrabMan

Readership

The Handbook is a book for anyone interested in getting under the skin of the heritage sites they visit. It's of particular interest to the heritage and tourism industry itself,  anyone troubled by official guides to anywhere, site-specific artists and performers.

Counter-Tourism: The Handbook
A handbook for those who want more from heritage sites than a tea shoppe and an old thing in a glass case 
CrabMan

This is the definitive guide to Counter-Tourism, except that Counter-Tourism has a low opinion of definitive guides. So it’s more like an equivocal misguide. It includes dozens of detailed Counter-Tourism ‘tactics’ plus the thinking behind Counter-Tourism, its academic and philosophical background, and its roots in film, music and literature.

It also features more than 200 colour photographs, gathered by the author in the course of his counter-tourist driftings.

In addition, Part 2 of the Handbook has ideas on how to extend the tactics into interventions that can be planned and performed in heritage sites. And Part 3 goes on to suggest open ‘infiltrations’ that can be used by heritage site managers themselves to reinvent their own sites. Alongside this there’s a photo-essay on using the tactics, and a full bibliography.

The Handbook is a bridge between the playful practicality of the Pocketbook and the deep space of Mythogeography.

Review in New Theatre Quarterly

The Handbook...
"... offers a rhetorical as much as a practical attack on heritage's claim over the past"

"... might, with some luck... enter the backpacks of heritage insurgents with no scholastic ambition" 

"offers a cogent reminder of alternative modes of understanding that begin with action and end in new thought"

Read the full review at NTQ
Watch one of the hundreds of Counter-Tourism Tactics:
Read an extract from the Handbook:
Phil Smith (aka Crab Man) used to walk sideways. Now he stumbles, shambles and groans.

In his fantastic book Counter-Tourism:The Handbook he encourages us to see the world in a new way, to re-view the familiar through our own mischief, to play with established sites, to usurp the rules set by the heritage industry and question the geographic and historic hegemony. He enables us to recognise that history and our expectations of landscape are a construct and that we would have much more fun if we fabricated our own. Above all Phil Smith encourages us to play again,  to rip up our guide books and write a new narrative over the landscape.

He encourages us to slip into liminal spaces, explore boundaries, discover that the most interesting places are often the least visited. In his dérives he has uncovered ways of enjoying the world anew.
Read the full review

Read more:

Reviews of the book
About the author
Counter-Tourism website
Alternative City Guide
​Summing Up On Excursions
Submissions and Suggestions
Drift, drive, thrift, thrive

5 Ways to Use a Map

Related titles:
​All our books on Walking
Alice's Dérives in Devonshire
Counter-Tourism: Pocketbook