Cornwall’s ‘tourism board’ will now be advertising Cornwall all over the world as a Duchy, Celtic region and emphasising Cornwall’s unique culture and heritage.
This follows ongoing criticism from Cornish circles that the unique cultural and constitutional status of the Duchy of Cornwall was being ignored in attracting visitors.
As well as being lazy writing and not accurate, use of terms like County and England used by Visit Cornwall just adds to the incessant misinformation propaganda of the BBC’s ‘County, County, County’ and Northcliffe Media’s ‘Southwest’, Westcountry’ and ‘County’.
There has also been mounting commercial criticism that the ‘brand’ being presented as Cornwall for tourism and trade purposes was bland and un-differentiated, within and outside the British Isles.
This recently came again into focus with the excruciatingly bad Cornwall with Caroline Quentin TV program.
Malcolm Bell (Head of Visit Cornwall) has told lobby group Kernow Calling this week, that “We finalised the revised “about-cornwall” section on http://www.visitcornwall.com on Tuesday and all references to County will be removed and an increased emphasis on Cornish Celtic heritage, industrial legacy and the Cornish language etc. It should be all up on the site by the middle of next week’ (ie. 8 August, 2012).
”In addition, I have briefed the marketing and communication guys that the term County should no longer be used and instead the terms Cornwall, Cornish, Duchy and region will be used in all our ‘comms’ and ‘England’ references should be avoided, and only used if we have to.”
Readers of Cornwall24.net e-magazine can assist by keeping an eye out for creeping references, and giving positive feedback to Visit Cornwall that there is even more to attract people to Cornwall than just sand, sun, and surf.
Contact Visit Cornwall: http://www.visitcornwall.com/about-cornwall/contact-us
Enjoy Cornwall, with Will Coleman: http://vimeo.com/41724325
Visit Cornwall is the current official tourism service for Cornwall. It is the trading name of the tourism service of Cornwall Development Company Ltd , which is a registered company in England and Wales, registration number 3668828 – a local authority company controlled by Cornwall Council.
Malcolm Bell is reported as saying:
“Research carried out by VisitCornwall found that, of the visitors questioned, 75% said they were aware of the Cornish language – of that group 67% said they wanted to know more while 20% said they didn’t.
Some 58% said they were aware of Cornwall’s Celtic heritage, of which 69% said they would like to learn more and 31% said they didn’t.
“We work closely with VisitEngland and VisitGB wherever we can. We are merely trying to big ourselves up to compete with other holiday destinations.”