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The term cultural industries was coined more than half a century ago, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the broader concept of creative industries, covering a wide range of cultural, design and digital activity, captured the imagination of public policymakers at national and city levels. Paralleling these developments has been the recognition of the phenomenon of cultural tourism and, more recently, the emergence of the idea of creative tourism, that is, tourism programmes designed to engage tourists actively in cultural activity. This paper presents a case study of a creative tourism event which took place in 2012 in the City of Manchester in the UK. The festival, which celebrated West African culture, utilised existing cultural institutions of the city and drew on the talents of local and visiting members of West African community to engage not only tourists but also indigenous and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) residents of Manchester in a variety of cultural activities. It thus used the focus of creative tourism to seek to foster community and cultural development as well as tourism.

This article considers the ways in which displaced artists represent the experience of displacement, their cultural traditions and the longing for home through paintings and how, by doing so, they become the visual interpreters of the current refugee crisis. The starting point of this article is that little attention has been paid towards the visual narratives of artworks produced by refugee artists and shared on online open platforms like, for example, Facebook. Through the visual semiotics analysis of 150 images of paintings (exhibited on the Facebook page Syria.Art) and through a number of individual interviews with the artists who produced such artworks, the article identifies three emerging visual narratives. These are concerned primarily with reminiscences about people, places and cultural practices lost (or in danger of being lost) because of forced journeys and displacement. Within this context, these visual discourses become part of an open repository, which mediates, re-organizes and preserves memories, both personal and collective, as a form of emotional survival and resilience. It is argued that these visual narratives and representations nurture empathy for the human condition of the refugees and universalize the migrant experience.

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This short article focuses on two heritage sites (the International Bomber Command Centre and Creswell Crags) and reflects on the ways in which such medium-size institutions are trying to find ways of maintaining offsite engagement with young audiences while at the same time generating revenues.