![]() ![]() “I like uniformity,” says Lloyd, who describes his magnets as “miniature works of art”. One Las Vegas magnet even reminds Lloyd of the time he and his son were in a car crash. “They’re very reminiscent of a happy holiday or somebody I met or somebody who met me,” says Lloyd, who has visited 117 countries.Įvery day when Lloyd walks past his magnets, “it sparks a memory of an event or a road trip or visiting people”. A retired primary school teacher, he has been gifted him some by his pupils, but most were picked up on his travels. Today, Lloyd, now 70, has more than 5,550 magnets lining the walls of his Cardiff home. “And at the end of that year,” Lloyd says, “I came home with 200 magnets.” ![]() ![]() His first was from the Sydney Opera House. “I’d never seen a fridge covered in magnets,” Lloyd says, “I’d only seen them in the shop.” Inspired by his colleague’s collection, he decided to pick up magnets while travelling around Australia. But in 1987, when the couple moved to Australia for a year, Lloyd was invited to dinner at a colleague’s house. It depicted a horse and carriage, and Lloyd couldn’t really have cared less. In 1981, Tony Lloyd’s wife bought a magnet from Amish Country when the couple were holidaying in New England. Of course, an umbrella, hammock, boomerang, mug and a pair of clogs aren’t easy to display uniformly in a cupboard, which is why some well-travelled tourists prefer to pick one type of souvenir – and stick with it. “There are certain things that have taken hold in the collective imagination,” Lethbridge says. Meanwhile, we bring back clogs from the Netherlands, Moomin mugs from Finland and chocolate from Belgium. The top-selling souvenir from Brazil is a hammock, Australia’s is a boomerang, while tourists in Russia love a matryoshka doll. According to its research, maple syrup is the most popular souvenir from Canada, while visitors to the UK prefer to pick up an umbrella. Photograph: Ackerman + Gruber/The ObserverĪ 2021 report from travel company Club Med revealed how countries are encapsulated today. Curtiss has 687 miniature buildings 134 of them are Eiffel Towers. Iron ladies: with her collection of Eiffel Tower souvenirs in her home in St Paul, Minnesota. “It’s instantly recognisable, it can be miniaturised on a keyring. ![]() “But, of course, it makes a very good souvenir,” Lethbridge says of the Iron Lady. “Paris didn’t have an Eiffel Tower before 1887, so that it should have become the symbol of Paris is interesting,” Lethbridge says – the cathedral of Notre-Dame, after all, was built in the 1100s. At the Great Exhibition, an emu’s egg epitomised New Zealand, in the same way a miniature Eiffel Tower epitomises France today. This, Lethbridge writes, is when national differences became “encapsulated” in objects – when a single item could come to represent an entire country. There were silver-enamelled handicrafts from India, an eighth-century Celtic brooch from Ireland and firearms from America. But, Lethbridge notes: “The souvenir came into its own with mass industrial manufacture.” In 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations launched in London and 65,000 visitors marvelled at wonders from the world. Our long history of bringing stuff home perhaps indicates that souvenirs satiate something deep within us – a primal psychological urge. There’s evidence, she adds, that the ancient Greeks took back funeral figures – “shabtis” – from Ptolemaic Egypt, and her book explores everything from bones foraged from the battlefields of Waterloo to stucco surreptitiously peeled and pocketed from the Baths of Titus in Rome. “It’s proof, isn’t it? It’s proof of your adventure,” Lethbridge says. By learning about our keepsakes, we can learn about ourselves. What has kept us buying trinkets for hundreds of years? Souvenirs are unique objects that at once reveal how we perceive others (the most popular souvenir bought in France is a beret) and how we want others to perceive us (“Oh, this old thing? It’s from a small shop in Paree!”). According to Lucy Lethbridge, author of Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves, the first British tourists were medieval pilgrims and the first souvenirs were cockleshells brought back from the Spanish shrine of St James (the shell was the saint’s emblem). Of course, it hasn’t always been this way. Whether glancing at a German gift shop or scouring a Spanish stall, you’ve likely noticed that many souvenirs are fairly standardised – a neon shot glass here, a miniature building there. That’s something you probably already know. Aside from the pandemic, Zhao says the souvenir market “has not changed much in recent years”. While Covid-19 temporarily put things on pause, the industry quickly recovered. “The tourist souvenir market is actually a relatively mature market,” Zhao says – he sells around £3.5m-worth of product to wholesalers annually. ![]()
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