Haworth, in West Yorkshire, has been a tourist destination for a long time. The Brontë sisters lived there, the parsonage is now a museum, and the landscape around it does a good deal of the work.
Recently it has been busier than ever — and according to residents and business owners, the new arrivals are a different kind of visitor. They are coming because of how the village looks on social media, particularly in autumn.
A search on TikTok or Instagram turns up a great deal of content promoting Haworth as somewhere to visit in October. A good share of those posts feature the queues themselves.
Six weeks
The businesses along the cobbled main street have leaned into Halloween with elaborate window displays, and none more than The Cabinet of Curiosities, a Victorian-style apothecary selling soaps, candles and gifts. Its decor has made it a hit online, and people now queue to photograph it or look inside.
Karen Roberts has worked there for nearly twenty years. "It suddenly started about six weeks ago to the point where we’ve had queues outside every weekend waiting to come in," she told the BBC. "This week, with it being half-term, we’ve literally had people outside every day."
Nobody ran a campaign
This is the part worth noticing. The shop already had a social media presence, but Roberts thinks the reason it "all blew up like this" is the sheer volume of people posting about the shop and the village on their own accounts.
"We’ve always let people film, we’ve never had a problem with that, but definitely people are asking me now, can they come in and film?" she said. "Then they share it, and every day you turn on Facebook and you go, ‘oh my God, there is more’."
Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has also renewed interest in Brontë country.
The cost side
More footfall is good for the shops, but Roberts points to the downsides too — parking is the main one, along with what the village is left to clear up.
The wider pattern is familiar wherever a recommendation system settles on a physical place. The attention arrives in weeks, it is aimed at a shopfront rather than an institution, and it leaves on the same schedule. The museum that has drawn visitors for a century has to share its street with it, and the village has to absorb the parking either way.
The shape of this is now predictable
What happened to Haworth has happened to a beach in Thailand, a staircase in Paris, a lavender field in Provence and a street of painted houses in half a dozen cities. The sequence barely varies: a place photographs unusually well, a few posts do unexpectedly well, the recommendation system notices the engagement and shows the place to people who have never heard of it, and within weeks there is a queue.
The thing that makes it hard to manage is that nobody decided. There is no campaign to pause and no organiser to negotiate with — just a very large number of individual people posting about somewhere they enjoyed, and a ranking system doing what it was built to do.
Who absorbs it
The benefits land narrowly and the costs land widely. The shop in the photographs does well. The parking, the bins and the roads are the village’s problem, and the residents who did not ask for any of it carry that part.
There is a version of this worth watching for here too. Bangladesh has no shortage of places that would photograph beautifully in the right light, and the infrastructure around most of them was not built for a sudden multiplication of weekend visitors. The lesson from Haworth is not that the attention is bad. It is that it arrives faster than anything can be built to receive it, and leaves on a schedule nobody controls.
