A week or two ago, we woke up to read a prominent dispatch from London which has been syndicated and published in many cities throughout the country. It was a rousing appeal from Prime Minister Blair to arise and go now - not to Innisfree - or any other romantic relic of the past, but to come and see modern Britain. In short, to forget the old sentimental tourist's image of England - cute villages and thatched cottages, and tea and crumpets, and Lord Peter Wimsey with his butler poking around in somebody's garden looking for the character who killed the vicar's wife.

Britain today, Mr. Blair rightly declared, is a country thoroughly at home in the late twentieth century, a leader in some science research, pulsing with modern technology and bustling, forward-looking entrepreneurs - and go-getting can-do businessmen. No more poky old red pillar boxes - or was it telephone booths? No more judges with white wigs.

Everywhere you go in the New Britain, he maintained, you'd see something modern - even post-post modern. He might have been quoting a stirring line from W. H. Auden: "Look shining on new styles of architecture, a change of heart." Incidentally, W. H. Auden left that line out of a later printing of the poem. He explained in a footnote that he must have been swept away by a gust of romantic emotion. In fact, he wrote, "I hate new styles of architecture .. I greatly prefer the old."

There he put his finger on what I suspect is going to be the point of this talk. My wife put it in a blunter way as soon as she'd finished reading Mr. Blair's appeal to come and see the Brave New Britain, she said: "Going to lose a million tourists."

The mention, in that appeal, of thatched cottages made me think of Monday evenings on the national network of public television in this country. One of the perennial, seemingly never dying series, is Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories - and I believe (indeed I know from surveys that have been taken) that its lasting appeal here is not so much the ingenuity of the plots, or even the familiar characters who play them out - but the picture of rural England that is more firmly and endearingly impressed every week: those winding lanes and thatched cottages and the smoke rising from the old chimney of an old inn, with Tudor beams and crackling wood fire - and the genial bobbies with helmets coming on a footprint and saying, "Hell-oh."

To its devoted middle-aged and old audience, it's the Britain they used to know, or want to know. And Americans who have never been to England are only vaguely aware, if at all, that it's England in the 1920s and early 30s.

This attitude - a preconception about a foreign country which you want to hold onto - is surely the central appeal of tourism. I'm sure I have only to call off certain capitals of the world to have a vivid single picture, that's been filed away at the back of your mind, flash into the front of it. If I say "Paris" I doubt many listeners would at once picture the medical lab where the foremost AIDS research in the world is being done. Does India immediately suggest the University of Calcutta or the sleeping or the dead people on the streets? No, it happily suggests the Taj Mahal. And the most popular sport in Spain? Soccer by far - most Spaniards have never seen a bullfight. And when I say "America" do you at once remember that more Americans buy season tickets to symphony concerts than to baseball? All this may be enlightening, but I'm sure it's jarring to people looking over a travel folder.

I've often been asked by listeners to send them an advisory tour over the United States and, at one time, these requests were so frequent that I thought to get out a printed list which I now see was based on the assumption that travellers, tourists, anyway, want to see varieties of beautiful landscape. But I've noticed that with the travelling young, landscape is not a primary interest, however majestic and awesome it makes - they say - "pretty pictures". Certainly, since the twilight of the English Georgian poets, there's been a drastic decline into nothingness of what was called pastoral poetry.

For the past, I suppose, forty years or so, English and American poetry seems to be mostly about me, the author - and his/her troubled psyche. I may be wrong. But I'm pretty sure that few poets today write about the shifting light on a canyon wall, or a high tide on a beach or a flower.

But I have to believe that there are, among intending visitors to the United States, many - probably most - who have retained this old fashioned purpose in travelling: to see what is special about the cities, and to see what is beautiful about the land outside the cities. My tour used to suggest - as must-see places: Cities - New York, Washington, San Francisco. Landscape - the fall of New England at its most splendid and unbelievable in Central Vermont.

Out West, there is, of course, the Grand Canyon which - though a million people have said it's incomparable, breathtaking, they're right. But to me, America's two incomparable sights, the jewels of the canyon country are in Southern Utah - Zion Canyon, an unmatched example of wind erosion and the exquisite Bryce Canyon - where you look down on a thirteen mile curving canyon floor from which rise a thousand Salisbury Cathedrals made of rock in colour running from scarlet to bone white.

These were my irreducible minimum of special places to visit in America. And for a time I had the reward of grateful notes from people who'd more or less followed Cooke's Tour. But down the years, I've had many many more notes from Britons just to say how much they'd enjoyed their American trip, which invariably took in New York City, Miami, Disneyland, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. (Now to me, who owes nothing to the Chamber of Commerce of any city, the mere thought of dropping down through that veil of yellow smog into the five hundred sprawling square miles of Los Angeles, or to land at the nightmare of Miami Airport and then thread your human way through a half-dressed population, swarming over a huge Coney Island by the sea - well, it makes me marvel more than ever at the variety of human tastes.)

I am stressing the country - any country - the tourists go to see, because tourism was what Mr. Blair's appeal was all about. And before you make a pitch to a tourist you have, I think, not to tell him so much what he ought to see as to discover what he wants to see. I've found it's useless to tell foreigners that a very fine holiday may be spent in New York State - that here are many lakes and majestic mountains and waterfalls and forests for hiking - and a large island to explore or sail around. The mere mention of New York does not call up to a stranger a picture of lovely white beaches of mountains and waterfalls. It suggests skyscrapers, night life, theatres.

Just after the Second War, one of the most distinguished visitors to New York City was the author, Cyril Connolly. When he got here he called on me and wondered what he ought to see. This was startling, coming from a very literary Englishman, who'd already made connections with the rising and risen literati of the city and was already at home in Greenwich Village. I, with frank diffidence, mentioned the Statue of Liberty, going up to the top of the Empire State Building at sunset, taking the regular cruise around the two rivers that enclosed Manhattan Island. He didn't seem impressed. So I said apologetically, "But I'm afraid that's the usual tourist trek." He came alive. "But," he said, "I am a tourist. That's just what I wanted to hear. None of my friends here mentioned any of these sights. " He took out a little notebook and put down the suggestions and was smilingly on his way.

It was good to have a Very Superior Person say so simply, "But I am a tourist." And I think Mr. Blair would find, if he set some disinterested research people to work - if there are any such - I think he'd find that this is the great age of tourism because (well firstly, of course, the jet plane has made the countries of the earth accessible), but mainly because there is an urge, even in the most sophisticated people, to "get away from it all" - that's to say, to get away from the dinning realities of their familiar life and go off into another country. But, a country of the mind in the shape and colour they'd imagined it to be.

Towards the end of the Second World War, when American tourism to Europe was obviously verboten - there was a popular move to go on holiday in the tropical islands of the Bahamas and the Caribbean - partly in response to President Roosevelt's plea to get to know Central and South America as "our good neighbours". A lot of wounded or released soldiers sought rest and recreation there. And the natives soon found that Americans didn't want them to be inhabitants of the 20th century, to see people dressed like themselves with the same dances, drinks, ways of entertainment. They wanted them to put on the old traditional costumes, dance the carioca, sing calypso songs - and the natives obliged with a mocking song that celebrated a hybrid drink - "they were drinking," the song said - to a calypso beat - "rum and coca co-la .. working for the Yankee doll-ar."

In other, more brutal plain words, sir, Americans of all degrees of sophistication, don't want to go to England to see skyscrapers, the latest cyclotron or bright young account executives, or the latest buildings of the latest chic British architect. They have all these things at home. In their secret heart, what they want are not new styles of architecture, a change of heart, but old styles of architecture, no change of heart; tea and crumpets - which they've never seen - the Changing of the Guard, soldiers with plumed helmets cantering along Rotten Row, judges with wigs, beefeaters and castles and ye olde pubs. So "Please - don't strip the thatch off the cottage, Mr. Blair. Give a second thought to the Yankee doll-air."

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