There is a building on Weston's promenade called the Tropicana. A 1930s art deco lido turned entertainment venue and the site Banksy chose for Dismaland in 2015. Today it is derelict. You could walk past it and file it under everything people say about the British seaside.
Except Weston has planning permission and an operator in place to turn it into a 5,000 capacity live music and events venue.
That is roughly how the whole visit went.
A walking tour and about 24,000 steps
I went to the TMI Convention 2026 not really knowing what to expect. I work with tourism and event organisations every day and I knew these were my people but the value of it caught me off guard.
Day one was a walking tour of the town to see how Weston is putting culture at the heart of its development. I guessed we covered about eight miles. I heard rumours of 24,000 steps. Whatever the final number, my legs knew it was a good distance.
We started at Birnbeck Pier, a heritage pier being fully refurbished so people can use it again. Then the Marina Lake, a natural sea water swimming pool that holds water back between the tides and gives families somewhere safe to swim. The Severn Estuary and Bristol Channel have the second largest tidal range in the world, so that is not a small piece of engineering.
Then the walls. Weston Wallz is an annual event run by Upfest that has filled the town with large scale street art. Six years in, with another 20 murals added this year, more than 80 can now be found across Weston and some of these were stunning. After that a public park in the town centre, lovingly restored with local community organisations and then an arts organisation running a yearly programme of festivals that pulls in local people of every age alongside visitors from much further afield.
North Somerset Council, with support from National Lottery Heritage and Arts funding, has captured what its communities actually said they wanted and is pushing on with it. Not one flagship project. Several, at once.
The bit that made me think about home
Here is what I was not expecting. Weston has the same problems we have in Barrow.
If you live outside the town it is close to impossible to get home after an event. There is not enough hotel space. The local public transport does not do what the ambition needs it to do.
None of that is stopping them. They are working with transport operators and local authorities to make the projects land anyway and solving the access problem alongside the thing people are trying to access rather than waiting for it to be solved first.
I run a small DIY music venue in Barrow called BUMS and I sit on the cultural development team in my own town. I spent a lot of that day looking at Weston and seeing Barrow. It was an unexpectedly useful way to think about home from 280 miles away.
Thank you to Kathryn Davis for leading the tour and taking me under her wing. I felt genuinely welcome and had a lot of fun.
Day two and the thing I keep coming back to
Day two was at the Winter Gardens, a beautiful pavilion set just back from the seafront. More than a hundred tourism professionals in the room. I sat down next to a gentleman at one of the round tables who turned out to have a long history of recording original music and a real interest in our little venue, possibly including coming up to play. I clearly chose the right seat.
What followed was a proper look at what the UK tourism industry is wrestling with right now, what is going well and why TMI matters as a place where members share what they know rather than guard it. I met some of the most thoughtful and experienced people in this sector and had the chance to talk about the work we do at Evidence Agency on sentiment and influence tracking, alongside our fieldwork teams who go out and ask visitors the questions that actually need asking.
But one thing stuck with me more than anything on the agenda.
These people are passionate about their place. And their place is not defined by council lines or authority borders. It is their community and they are usually working with several partners at once to bring everyone together behind it, supporting local businesses and residents while attracting and looking after visitors.
Barrow is part of Cumbria. It is part of Westmorland and Furness. It is a neighbour to Millom, Dalton and Ulverston. It sits on a stunning coast. It is a peninsula at the tip of Morecambe Bay.
