This article looks at how particular ‘pasts’ are constructed and argues that this work is integral to the new forms of cultural tourism that draw on nostalgic memory to generate a ‘tourist impulse’. In order to tease out the relationship between memory and tourism it will be necessary to unravel some popular perceptions about nostalgia. This is a mode of remembering that is often described as a ‘tyranny’. I argue, however, for a more positive interpretation; one that accepts nostalgic reminiscence as a valid way of accessing the past. It is accepted that evidence and traces of the past may be found in a variety of materials; in texts, objects, monuments, landscapes and images. Much less credit is accorded to the fact that access to the past is dispersed across different routes, each governed by distinctive yet interconnected methodologies and located in dispersed sites ranging from the personal to the institutional. As Stephen Bann comments: ‘History as a science is interfused and interwoven with history as myth’. This relationship can be schematically illustrated. Although these routes are shown as discrete and independent there is capacity for an osmotic seepage between them and as Bann also notes: ‘There is a real interest in exploring the texture of this interrelationship, which is so much more intricate when its threads are not torn sharply apart’.