Text A: The best thing that ever happened to us

[1] Ten years ago, our town was quietly dying. The harbour that had once launched a fishing fleet held three tired boats; the high street lost a shop a year; and the young left for the cities the moment they could, because there was nothing here to keep them. Then the visitors came — and everything changed.

[2] The numbers tell the plainest part of the story. Where there were empty units there are now cafes, galleries and guesthouses; where there was one bus a day there are four. Nearly a third of the jobs in the town now depend, directly or indirectly, on the people who arrive each summer with their cameras and their appetite for our coastline. Money that would once have drained away to the cities now flows back into local pockets. That flow has paid for things the town could never have afforded alone: the resurfaced coastal path, the new lifeboat, the small grants that keep the primary school's doors open. A place that earns its own way, rather than waiting for help that never comes, holds its head a little higher.

[3] But the deeper change is harder to count. A town with visitors is a town with a future, and a future changes how a place feels about itself. The old cinema, boarded up for a decade, has reopened. Two young families who left for the city have come home to run businesses. Traditions that were fading — the boat festival, the market — have been polished up and are thronged again, kept alive as much by the newcomers' delight as by our own.

[4] Of course visitors bring litter and traffic and the occasional bad manners. But these are the small change of prosperity, the price of being a place worth visiting rather than a place worth leaving. I would rather live in a town that is loved by too many than one that is remembered by too few.

Text B: We are selling the thing we love

[5] There is a photograph of our harbour, taken before the crowds, that I keep on my wall. I look at it more often than I should, because the harbour in the photograph no longer exists — not really. What stands there now wears the same shape, but it has become something else: a stage set, arranged for strangers, of the place it used to be.

[6] Prosperity, we are told, has arrived. But look closely at whose prosperity it is. The cottage where my grandmother lived is now let by the week to holidaymakers, one of dozens; a young couple from the town cannot dream of buying it, because the price has floated up beyond any local wage. We have jobs, yes — seasonal, low-paid jobs, making beds and serving coffee to the very people who have priced us out of our own streets.

[7] And the town itself is being slowly rewritten to suit its visitors. The hardware shop is a fudge shop; the working chandlery is a gallery of paintings of working chandleries. Everything is charming now, and nothing is quite real. In summer the streets are so full that the old people who built this place can no longer cross them. And the prosperity is dangerously thin: it arrives for twelve weeks and vanishes for forty, so that families ride a yearly wave from frantic overwork to empty pockets, never quite able to plan, never quite secure. A town that lives by a single season lives always one bad summer from disaster.

[8] I am not asking for the town to die. I am asking us to notice the trade we are making, before it is finished. A place can welcome visitors without dissolving into a souvenir of itself. If we are not careful, we will look up one day and find that we have sold the very thing the visitors came to see — and that we, its people, have quietly been shown the door.