Last of the Summer Wine tourism isn’t limited to specific times of the year. The Summer Wine Magic bus tours, which take passengers on a 10-mile journey around the filming locations used in the show, run between 11-4 Wednesday to Saturday and the Wrinkled Stocking Tea Room, part of the building used as the filming location for Nora Batty’s cottage – which is now a self-catering cottage – serves cream teas in a room adorned with photographs, paintings, and memorabilia. In addition to these, the Summer Wine exhibition, located in Compo’s old house, is open year-round. Among the displays of screen-worn clothing and props is a TV showing a documentary about Summer Wine and its impact on the town, along with a plaque proclaiming that the show was Queen Elizabeth II’s favourite and stacks of condolence books filled with memories from fans following the death of Bill Owen (who played Compo) in 1999. I sat in the exhibition for a while, watching the documentary, and several families passed through while I was there. One wanted to sign a book of condolence – testament to the generational fandom of the show as adults who watched it as kids share the same ritual with their own children – while another told me how much they missed having something like Last of The Summer Wine on TV now.
Perhaps one of the most famous locations in Holmfirth, though, is Sid’s Café. Owned by Laura Booth, who was instrumental in organising the 50th anniversary celebration, the café is also an accessible filming location. And the transformation of the café perhaps epitomises the effect the show and its fans had on Holmfirth. When the series was filmed, the building was used as storage for the ironmonger’s next door, the exterior decorated for filming by the BBC. As fans began visiting the town, the building was bought and turned into a working café, which itself was then used as a filming location (as in the 1985 episode whose title has been used for this blog post). Although filming ended in 2010, when I arrived in Holmfirth, Sid’s café was full of fans who had arrived for the anniversary weekend. One couple, who travelled from Kentucky, were among the scores of viewers who had visited Holmfirth from overseas. As Laura Booth points out, visitors come “from all over the world – America, Australia, Corsica, Sweden” and people from a range of different countries were at the anniversary weekend.
