Inside U.K. Britain Offers Much To Enjoy This Summer By STEVE HILL	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
この夏、イギリスは見所満載 もう数ヵ月で、夏が到来します。今年の休暇は海外旅行を、と考えている皆さん、行き先はお決めになりましたか？　イギリスでは、ロンドンのミレニアム・ドームや大観覧車をはじめ、全国各地に新名所が続々と登場しました。そのいくつかをご紹介すると——

The advent of spring leads many of us to start thinking about our plans for a summer holiday. For tourists heading for Britain this year there are many new attractions worth considering.

Many visitors arrive at either Heathrow Airport or Gatwick Airport and content themselves with being in London, where so many sights are within easy reach of each other. But those with extra time on their hands and just a little spirit of adventure have a wonderful chance to experience something new and very different.

Most of the tourists, though, find so much to see and do in our capital city that they never even consider traveling outside the confines of the tube (London Underground) map — and why not?

This year there are two major new attractions: the Millennium Dome and the London Eye.

I'll start with the Dome, which appears to have overcome teething problems following its opening in January, when bad publicity regarding the length of queues led to a drop in visitor numbers.

Jennie Page, the chief executive of the company that runs the Dome, was sacked just five weeks after the opening of the £758 million (¥155 billion) exhibition space and was replaced by Frenchman Pierre-Yves Gerbeau, who appears to have helped inspire a big turnaround in fortunes.

The number of visitors has increased while positive publicity and feedback are forcing more and more people to consider visiting the Dome before it closes, forever, at the end of the year. There are a total of 14 zones to see, including a tour through the human body and a voyage through space. It may take more than a day to experience it all!

Flights yes, that's what they're called instead of rides — on the London Eye last just 30 minutes but are proving just as popular. It takes 15 minutes to reach the top of the 443-feet (133-meter) wheel, where, on a clear day, "passengers" can see all the major London landmarks and the surrounding terrain for some 25 miles (40 kilometers). And at £7.45 (¥1,570) for adults and £4.95 (¥1,014) for those under 16, flights represent reasonable value.

Other new attractions include the Football Association Premier League Hall of Fame in County Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, and the nearby British Film Institute London IMAX cinema, with a screen that is six stories high and five double-decker buses wide. It is due to open May 1.

There is also The Globe Shakespeare exhibition, billed as the world's largest exhibit dedicated to the famous playwright, while Greenwich is the setting for a major international millennium exhibition called The Story of Time, running until Sept. 24.

Moving out of London, one of the most ambitious new projects and tourist attractions the country has seen in recent years is fast taking shape at St. Austell, in the rugged southwest county of Cornwall. The home of the Eden Pro ject (as in the biblical Garden of Eden) is a massive china clay pit, a 197-feet (60-meter) deep crater the size of 30 soccer pitches that will contain thousands of important and beautiful plants.

A visitor center at the £53 million (¥10.8 billion) center is due to open in May, with the full opening following in Easter 2001.

Here in my home city of Bristol, also in the west, two new attractions are close to opening.

The first is Wildscreen@Bristol, which will bring visitors face-to-face with the diversity of the natural world as they walk through a botanical house. An I- MAX cinema is also being built, as well as a digital archive of endangered species. Screenings of the world's best wildlife films will soon be taking place there.

The second project, Explore@Bristol, is a hands-on project that encourages visitors to become actively involved with science and technology.

In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, tourists have a choice of several different "Titanic" tours in Belfast, the birthplace of the ill-fated liner.

Or how about something completely different, like The Pork Pie Experience in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire? The pork pie — pork wrapped in a thick pastry casing — is traditional English food. Here you can make your own pie, have it cooked overnight, and take it home to eat the next day.

For those with enough energy to spare, how about checking out the new national network of cycling routes being put in place from Land's End, in Cornwall, to Inverness in Scotland?

Or how about taking part in a Jane Austen walk in the beautiful city of Bath? It could complement a visit to the Jane Austen Center, which opened last year.

Details of many of these new attractions are available on the British Tourist Authority's Web site: www.visitbritain.com.

Shukan ST: April 21, 2000

(C) All rights reserved