The Victoria Park Memoryscape Tour

I have neglected audio tours on this blog up till now so it is time to put that right. I therefore took a free audio tour around Victoria Park in East London a tour that you can download HERE. It is just one of several that have been produced for different sites around London by Memoryscape. 

To take the walk you need to have the map which indicates the points where each of the 11 tracks should be played. It begins at the south entrance of the park with some legal notices about not accepting responsibility for any harm that might befall the listener. It is a peculiar start that made me wonder if there was some likelihood of trouble, teenage gangs picking out solitary walkers, rupturing their historical reflections at knifepoint with demands for money, phone and credit card. This opening could even provide the inspiration for an audio tour of its own, an audio tour on knife crimes and violent assaults that have taken place on the route of the tour. An audio tour complete with heartbeats, footsteps, Psycho violin sounds and gunshots. It presents itself as a local history tour with a crime focus but is actually just using this as a pretext and is simply trying to scare people witless. I even know the perfect location for this tour: The Murder Mile Tour of Clapton.  

The listening points are not fixed in the way they are when you have a live guide to direct your attention. Instead you press play when you get to what looks like the right location on the map. Here for example I listened to the proprietor of the cafe talking about, and more or less welcoming, the gentrification of the Hackney yet the cafe was shut for the evening and there were some drunks knocking back cans of Special Brew and Super K cider stood in front of the cafe. This disjunction between the sound and image was funny but it made the recording slightly ridiculous as it was unplanned and outside its frame. This more general problem of focal point was a recurrent one because a great deal of the commentary was about what was there in the past and not what is there now. This meant the descriptions often wafted over the landscape not settling anywhere in particular while the park remained buoyant. The one aspect of the tour that was however more connected to the landscape was the sound design which mirrored existing ambient sounds, added some others for effect, and sometimes created genuine confusion whether what you heard was the recording or the actual park.     

I was listening to it on my not overly smart phone that placed the sound files in different places. The tracks were all there however and with the walking time added on the whole thing took about an hour and twenty minutes, the classic sort of tour duration: 75-90 minutes. For those without their own means of listening it is possible to borrow devices from the park hub. 

One thing that struck me about listening to a tour on headphones rather than being given one by a guide is that this format is suitable for controversial content. Where it might not be acceptable to say certain things out loud someone listening to them on an audio tour can hear this information unbeknownst to those around. The Tate a Tate audio tours made in protest at the Tate's acceptance of BP sponsorship is an example of this. These offer a very alternative and unofficial commentary to the gallery's standard audio tour. 

The way the recordings work is the narrator carries the bulk of the work and the physical guiding responsibilities. He introduces the different people who relate their memories of the park saying, for example, "the lake in front of you was used for model boats." He then says, "Norman Lara" and we hear Norman saying, "I'm the chairman of the Victoria model steamboat club. Been the chairman for at least 20 years." 

There were a great many people who shared their memories and the structural difficulty of this audio tour is that people's memories obey neither the logic of the walking route nor any chronological or thematic logic. This meant that the interviews were heavily cut and pasted, but even then it was impossible to organise the tour according to one central principle. It was instead pieced together according to effect.

There is a purpose to these oral history audio tours and this one did a competent job at capturing different memories and putting them together with enough narration to give them some context. It maintained an upright and respectful tone, like that of a teacher or some other sort of minor authority figure. All the time I was listening to it however I was thinking about how it could subvert itself and become a little less upright. Maybe that is just my schoolboy imagination or maybe there really is a need for us to be able to construct our own mythologies about the places we occupy rather than accepting those of the council's.  

As I was coming to the end of the tour I saw the three towers of The Lockton Estate, an unglamorous council estate that I had re-imagined in a previous performance of mine as the site of weapons of mass destruction threatening the Olympic Park. Sensationalist fear mongering whose purpose was to look at where the quite genuine fear came from. If history can help us understand what happened and how we came to where we are, so too can art which, as Picasso puts it, "is a lie that helps us see the truth. 

The Dalston Conservation Tour: a tour with two guides

This was a free guided-tour that was offered as part of Dalston People's Festival. It was advertised in this way: 

Respecting our heritage. Guided walk and discussion. Ray Blackburn of Dalston Conservation Area Advisory Committee will talk us through the history and merit of buildings we take for granted, the recent Design for London, Dalston Heritage Scoping Report and the work of the CAAC to protect that heritage and implement the report’s recommendations. How can we protect our history and keep Dalston unique?

About 15 of us assembled outside the new library at 6.30PM and while waiting for latecomers some of the characters of the walk became more evident. Ray our tall, knowledgable guide took a supporting position while the man on the right outlined some of the other tours that would feature in the festival and the objective of using the event to make proposals to the council. Another man identified himself as being part of the council but attending in an unofficial capacity, while Vincent from the planning department seemed to be mentioned in his absence more than once. I realised that this was not only an architectural tour but also one deeply involved in local politics. 

Our guide Ray got going by introducing the tour which worked on the (largely correct) assumption that  we were interested and even engaged citizens and definitely not tourists. He then explained that the tour would focus on what could be seen rather than telling us about what used to be there, as many historical tours do. He did however make one exception, mentioning the demolished station and how architectural features from it that could have been preserved were lost. He did this in order to introduce the question, "what should be done with architectural fragments?"  

We moved on to the old library, a rather undistinguished construction where we were told about its history and present use and about its architectural features. This was to set the tone for much of what followed: description of the building with particular attention to architecture followed by a question about conservation principles. The somewhat dull and unloved ex-library was described as a 'good example' of post-war modernist public architecture and important to preserve in order to be able to tell the story of Dalston from an architectural point of view. This is an interesting argument and one that appeals more to professionals in the architectural field; that things can be mundane even ugly yet of value to the narrative of the space.

Here we came to Kinetica the new 14-floor tower block that can be seen in the background. The question that he got to was how do these significantly taller buildings effect the appearance of the area that was previously built to just 3 or 4 floors. This format of beginning with an architectural description and using it as a lead in for a question of principal was his way to connect his expertise in architetural history and guiding with the political objectives of the tour's organisers. Although it was generally very clear what the answer should be, such as this tower is too tall, it was a soft sell that allowed the listeners space to consider it as a question. On balance this was quite a good approach as an overtly partisan tour would have probably turned some people off. Still, it was not difficult to read between the lines, what was offered were not genuine planning dilemmas, this was quietly working at convincing you of the value of increased conservation.  

Speaking of quiet, Dalston Lane was anything but. There was a continual stream of buses passing back and forth which proved a problem for our quietly spoken guide. We had to crowd close to hear him but inevitably things got lost in the hectic hum of engines, steel and rubber on asphalt.   

With our discussion of architecture it was inevitable we'd take in Dalston House, though greater attention was given to the Pentecostal church behind it and the issue of architectural continuity in street regeneration.

Dalston being Dalston there was a bit of action with the police so we had to find a quiet spot and here we learnt about the past of the Chinese restaurant Shanghai. Here the Dalston Heritage Scoping Report was circulated, a thick, well researched document on local architectural history. It was roundly praised and we admired the restaurant's former pie and mash exterior. 

Throughout the tour there had been a gentle tension between Ray, our guide, and the man who had organised the events on a wider level. He often added details to the commentary and particularly talked about the processes and politics of conservation. He wore his activist colours very overtly and was looking to come away with an action plan and recommendations while our guide (who really is a professional guide in his daily life) was more focussed on the architecture itself and on conservation principles. It is this double interest that gave the tour its unique flavour, a split focus that was quite literally personified. 

At the end of tour we were invited to the pub where a room was reserved for us and where the political side of the tour now took the dominant role. Most of those taking the took attended and gave their thoughts and suggestions on how to improve the conservation of Dalston. We got into the local politics more directly yet at the same time there was also a chance to meet some of the others taking the tours who included Hackney Tours guide Simon, who told me about the book, The Tour Guide a study of New York City tour guides that sounds very interesting and about his own tours that will, I hope, find their way onto this blog in the not too distant future.