'The lightbulb moment when the penny drops': The representation and experience of visiting and revisiting the former Western Front, 1919-2019

After the end of the Great War, the former battlefields of the Western Front became destinations for travel. A tourist infrastructure developed alongside a commemorative landscape of cemeteries, memorials, and preserved battlespaces. Tourists and pilgrims coexisted. Throughout the century, the landscape became a place of commemoration and consumerism, conflict and healing, memory and morality.

This thesis will explore visitors of the past and visitors of the present. It focusses on three distinct visitor types: civilians, veterans, and the military. It aims to show that individuals visited with their own motivations, expectations, and cultural understanding of the Great War. However, all visitors were linked by their ability to utilise the landscape for their own needs, experiencing the space as both tourist and pilgrim.

Using a range of modern surveys, historical narratives of travel to the battlefields, and archival sources, this thesis explore the experience of visiting the Western Front across the century. Utilising anthropological, historical, and sociological theories, it will show how visitors access knowledge and narrative in otherwise hidden landscapes; emotionally and physically exploring a 'thanotourism' landscape to ultimately reach a level of understanding and empathy.