It is the stately pleasure dome of Kubla Khan, extruded onwards. It is the triumphal arch for a future Cornish victory in an as yet unwritten English civil war. It is the Perspex tunnel linking Bude Sainsbury’s with a Sainsbury’s-affiliated car park; it is 230ft (70m) long, and it is now a celebrity. News that this outwardly unremarkable tunnel, originally designed to keep shoppers dry, is the Cornish town’s highest-ranking tourist attraction on TripAdvisor has rocked mildly amusing portions of the internet in the past few days.
Nineteen-year-old Amy Cox believes its primal tug is essentially communitarian: “It’s a great place to go when you’re a teenager, to drink, if you’ve got nowhere else to go.”
The owner of the Dollyrockers boutique expresses shock: “I just can’t see what’s so interesting about it. It takes literally less than a minute to get through. Maybe a bit more with a full trolley.”
But a staff member at the Brendon Arms suggests its true genius is its singularity: “There are no other tunnels in the town.”
Online, reviewers have praised its “handcrafted Cornish Perspex”, panoramic views and proximity to a cashpoint. The Beyond Bude website has been quick to cash in, selling postcards of the iconic long, straight thing with the legend “Nowhere else in Bude can you walk this far undercover in a straight line”.
First rated in September 2017, the past year has seen it leapfrog Red Elk Archery and The Castle Bude to first place, with more than 160 commenters having joined in. While it seems that someone may be engaged in a 6/10 wind-up, in fact, the joke is on them. Most towns beneath, say, Northampton’s size, do not have tourist attractions worthy of the name. Another Norman church, another Tudor tavern: who cares? To look at a plaque on a house where William Makepeace Thackeray once lived is to see precisely nothing. In most cases, the tourist attractions should be ringed on the map as places to avoid. They are full of tourists, for a start. A nice industrial estate or an accidental blunder into a street of gauche suburban villas is far more illuminating than a clifftop viewing point.
The cult of Edgelands is well established. In their 2011 book of that name, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts set out the idea that the unnamed places between the city and the countryside are where the real magic happens. Visiting a covered walkway can have the same magic for the common man as one of Will Self’s psychogeographic reccies. So let us salute these Marcel Duchamps of user-edited travel sites for pointing us away from the bogus, and into the ... well, into the Sainsbury’s car park.
