Industrial Heritage and Cultural Economics: British Heritage Railways and the Andalusian Case

Abstract

This work studies the emergence of cultural economics, insofar as it is the associated with the industrial heritage, within the context of post-industrial societies. From this point of view we approach cultural tourism, one of the most dynamic tourist markets and an important asset in the most developed nations.All over Europe, Britain has the biggest extension of heritage railways, precisely the country where the earliest modern railways were built and the one pioneer in the Industrial Revolution. The outstanding development of this industry is possible due to the free supply of manpower and capital; something to be placed in the paramount development of volunteering and civil society in Britain. Since their very inception, railways have enjoyed a prominent place in the imaginary as well as the collective identity in Britain, where both the steam power and the Industrial Revolution are paradigms of advancement. Heritage railways are a cultural tourism activity based on a public good; the (industrial) railway heritage. British experience suggests that the Third Sector (volunteering) is the most suitable for the preservation and reuse of industrial heritage. The province of Huelva, due to the outstanding development of mining on the Iberian Pyrite Belt since the last quarter of 19th century, would amount, in the beginning of the next century, to almost a third of the railway extension of Andalusia, when its surface is just a 12 per cent. As a result of this, its railway density became the double than in Andalusia or Spain. In this province is found the only heritage railway of the former and one of the very few of the later. With this exception, the closing of hundreds of kilometers of railway lines has meant the loss of the ensuing industrial heritage; dismantled and sold as scrap, often after some years of neglect and dereliction.The ultimate causes of this situation are to be found in the low interpersonal trust of the local society, which translates into the lack of genuine volunteering and into poor public governance; both of them directly affect the preservation and reuse of the railway heritage. In addition, a collective identity diverging from the British one, with different coordinates, precludes the appreciation of the Andalusian industrial heritage’s cultural value. Also, the emergence of a new identity paradigm would amount to a challenge of the current status quo and the elites that support it, apart from being clearly substitutive as far as the allocation of resources is concerned. All those facts ultimately bring our work to the field of the New Institutional Economics (NIE). From the microeconomics point of view, it is apparent that for the current stock of preserved and reused industrial heritage the demand clearly out sizes the level of supply, this explains the commercial success of the only heritage railway in service.