North or South of the river

The London Development Agency has a South London positioning guide on its website to focus the marketing of people in the travel industry on the part of the capital that doesn’t get the number of visitors that areas north of the River Thames get.

Unfortunately most of London’s premier tourist attractions are on the north side. The main financial centre of town, a lot of the most historic buildings, the most popular entertainment and shopping districts and the most fashionable residential areas, not to mention God’s playground at the Emirates Stadium are all in the glorious north.

Not trying to fight the obvious the LDA suggest’s that people marketing South London try and stress what a ‘relaxing’ place it is and how healthy, green, family orientated, friendly and basically unlike North London it is. They say potential visitors should feel they can have a ‘Sunday morning feeling’ all day, every day. I think they’re over doing the artistic licence there.

There are a lot of good things for visitors on the other side of the Thames. Anywhere along the south bank you’ll find some great attractions, from Kew Gardens and Richmond in the west to Greenwich in the east there’s a lot of fantastic sites and places to see in between.
Richmond Park and the Wimbledon area are really nice but there are some poorer, tougher and more crime ridden places not far from central London on the south side. As you go further south its going to get more and more suburban, relaxing and green probably, but with less to attract new visitors.

The market for South London has to be people who’ve been to London a few times but who are a bit adventurous and want to check out parts they haven’t seen, for first timers there’s too much going on elsewhere to make exploring it appealing.

To me one of the biggest problems South London would have to get over in attracting more visitors is the London Underground map. If you look at it I’m guessing 90-95% of stations are on the north side of the river. That map’s going to be in every guidebook and even subconsciously people are going to think there can’t be much happening down there because there’s no tube line, and if they did want to go it means figuring out the overground trains. Sticking to the tube network is too easy.