Haworth near Keighley in the Bradford district has been praised by Sophie-May Williams on The Metro’s travel team for being an “idyllic” spot, with the likes of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Top Withens being highlighted for lovely things to do.

It comes as the area home to the newly released Wuthering Heights film was recently dubbed one of the seven wonders of the UK to visit for 2026 by Conde Nast Traveller. (Molly Court)

Screen tourism is nothing new. Ever since the Lord Of The Rings trilogy let us all know that New Zealand is an actual real-world paradise, people have been seeking out the destinations featured in their favourite films and TV shows. However, in 2026, the trend is arguably more influential than ever. You only need to take a stroll across Richmond Green to spot the hordes of American Ted Lasso fans haunting the Cricketers pub, while Saint Tropez is already bracing for a surge in luxury travel following the announcement that the next season of The White Lotus will shoot there later this year.

No surprise then that Yorkshire has seen a huge spike in tourist interest since Emerald Fennell’s headline-grabbing take on Wuthering Heights hit cinemas back in February. With Fennell putting significant focus on the dramatic vistas of the Swaledale valleys (yes, we’re talking about that rock), a whole new audience seems to have woken up to just how beautiful the Yorkshire Dales truly are. And given 2026’s other big travel trend for wholesome, outdoorsy escapes, it’s not hard to see why visitor numbers are going through the roof. Rambling and hiking through stunning scenery by day, holing up in a cosy country pub by night… what’s not to love? (George Wales)

You could say that each generation gets the version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights it deserves. 1970 got Timothy Dalton’s impassioned glam rock Heathcliff, while 2011’s moody evocation of mizzly moorlands captured the austerity era. What does Emerald Fennell’s whip-cracking adaptation tell us about 2026?

Uncompromising in its theatricality and emotional intensity, it heralds the return of full-fat romance. This is not romance of the polite dinner date kind, but a hearty, high-octane dark gothic fantasy, crawling across brambly knolls on hands and knees. “Kiss me,” Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff utters to Margot Robbie’s Cathy in a deep Yorkshire brogue, “and let us both be damned.” [...]

Then, of course, there’s Romanticism with a capital R, referring to the late 18th-century movement in the arts, literature and philosophy. Rebelling against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, Romanticists sought a return to primitive wisdom and unsullied nature. Though published in 1847, Wuthering Heights is set in the late 1700s, with Emily Brontë deliberately putting her earthy and sensuous characters in a pre-industrialised landscape. Though popularly thought of as a love story, it’s essentially a cautionary tale in which emotions, intuition, and social codes come into conflict. Fennell’s adaptation seeks to tap into the characters’ primal emotions and instinctive desires. Much like the 18th-century Romanticists, we seek an escape from collective anxiety around rapidly developing technologies and the fraught nature of global politics. [...]

Romance in 2026 might entail spending time away from the screen and indulging our senses: soaking in the bath, exploring the natural world, setting the table rather than scoffing dinner in front of the television. It might manifest as seizing the moment and making spontaneous plans; or asking someone on a date for their infectious laugh, not because they know their best camera angle. Ultimately, it’s about cultivating and paying attention: choosing to do less, but to fully immerse ourselves in what we do. Granted, this isn’t quite the S&M-style cavorting of Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, but in seeking out small moments of joy, wonder and heightened sensorial experience we can all cultivate a sense of much-needed romance – red latex corset optional. (Rosa Abbott)

There is a meme circling online asking whether you’re an Emily Brontë or a Charlotte Brontë person. Every thirteen-year-old girl must decide, according to the post, with the implication that the way you answer that question at thirteen will determine the rest of your life. I was a Charlotte person, unambiguously. Charlotte’s world made sense to me in the way I needed the world to make sense at that age, offering self-respect, moral clarity, and—most importantly for my teenage self—a love story that felt earned. Jane Eyre taught me that suffering could be metabolized into dignity, that integrity was its own reward. I found Emily’s novel disturbing in a way I couldn’t quite name and kept my distance from it for years. Decades, really.

Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation has brought Wuthering Heights back into the conversation, and I suspect a lot of people are returning to Emily Brontë right now, or encountering her for the first time. Before you see it—or alongside it, or instead of it, depending on your disposition—I’d recommend picking up Karen Powell’s 2023 novel Fifteen Wild Decembers. It is the best preparation I know for that encounter, because far from softening Emily’s brutal vision or making Wuthering Heights more palatable, it offers something I didn’t have as a young reader: the context of what Emily Brontë was actually writing about, and why.

Powell’s novel is narrated in  Emily’s voice, and centers her role as primary caretaker for her brother Branwell during the years she was writing Wuthering Heights. Branwell Brontë—once the family’s great hope, the son on whom all expectations rested—spent those years in a spiral of alcohol and laudanum addiction, humiliated by a failed love affair with a married employer, cycling through rages and remorse, through binges and vows of sobriety that lasted until they didn’t. He died in September 1848, just months after Emily’s novel was published. She followed him that December.

What Powell renders so precisely is the dailiness of that care. Emily hauling Branwell home from drinking, supporting what she drily describes as “two grown men up the stairs, one half-blind, the other incapable”—her father, whose eyesight was failing, and her brother, who could barely stand. Emily scrubbing a soiled rug in the back kitchen the morning after, while Charlotte’s voice comes at her “sour as an underripe plum,” asking why she can’t make Branwell clean up after himself. The landlord at the inn, looking doubtfully at Emily as Branwell is shouldered to the door, shirt half-untucked, one sleeve of his coat hanging empty: You’ll manage? And Emily managing, as she always does, turning him in the right direction and tacking their way home.

These scenes are not dramatic in any conventional sense. They are repetitive by design, because that is what this kind of caregiving actually is—the same crisis with minor variations, the same hope extinguished in roughly the same way, the same morning after. Powell understands that the accumulation of these moments is itself a form of knowledge, and that Emily was accumulating it in real time while writing one of the strangest novels in the English language. (Ellen O'Connell Whittet)