The Melbourne Town Hall Tour

This is Melbourne Town Hall which, since it features on this blog, you will not be surprised to learn, offers tours. The tours are free and the group size is limited to ten. I booked a place with no difficulty and the group of four who had also booked for the same tour didn't show up making this a one on one tour. As a guide it can be frustrating when this happens, but as the guided, I did not feel any sense of loss. Fairly close to the start of the tour, the two of us stepped out onto the balcony above that displays the Horses poster (a tribute concert to the Patti Smith album) and I leant that this balcony had deeper rock and roll heritage still. My guide, a retired RMIT professor, told me that The Beatles once stood on this spot to greet a huge and out of control crowd of Melbourne's youth swept up in a tidal wave of Beatlemania.

Judging from the press coverage of their arrival in Melbourne it must have been quite extreme. Although this clip comes from outside their hotel around the corner, I was reliably informed that this scene was repeated on Swanston Street and at Festival Hall, where the concert took place. I was not completely surprised to learn this because, strangely enough, I already had a Beatles song stuck in my head, and I would not count myself as a particularly big fan of theirs. The traffic lights in the city centre make a sound when flashing green for pedestrians. This sound starts with a falling electronic tone followed by a succession of quick beeps which sounds not dissimilar to the start of Helter Skelter on the White Album. With this distorted soundtrack and the lyrics "you may be a lover but you ain't no dancer" already in the air, I speculated that the person who designed the sound for the crossings was one of the fans in that sea of teenagers back in 1964. Whilst this is almost certainly not true, it reflects a sort of tourist logic that I like to indulge in when visiting new places where I have but a few scraps of information at my disposal which, when put together, can produce a novel theory.

As we walked through the corridors, passing the security guards and pensioners enjoying a raucous party in one of the side rooms, we passed a number of people going about their business. My guide told me in a matter of fact tone, "that was the major". I rather liked the relaxed but respectful atmosphere in the building which was clearly a working town hall and not just a ceremonial shell. When walking around some official buildings an atmosphere of power and paranoia dominates, not so here. 

The guide stopped in front of this picture and explained the history of the city, in particular how it was planned and why there are such wide roads, large city blocks and lanes running cutting through them. We located the town hall on the corner of Swanson Street and Collins Street on the map and I was reminded of the municipal newspaper that I glanced through whilst waiting for the tour to start. It featured the predictable 'your city council working for you' stories and a list of proposed construction projects whose planning was up for public consultation. What was unusual about this otherwise dreary read was that it also included a full-page advert for Top Class of Collins Street who promised, "kinky escorts 5-minutes from your door." Whilst it is normal these days for civic publications to try and raise revenue from advertising, I was surprised to see they were openly accepting whole page spreads for prostitution on the doorstep of the Town Hall itself. I had earlier been taken to the city's former red light district as part of a tourist group, something I always feel is an odd attraction, and then here was the contemporary virtual red light district vying for attention in a seeming embrace with the city authorities.

We next stepped into the concert hall which seemed to mostly host 'respectable' concerts, namely classical music and events at which the audience is well-behaved and sits down. It says something that Patti Smith's Horses now falls into that category. Also coming up was a concert of Turkish Sufi dancers and musicians commemorating 100 years of peace between Turkey and Australia sponsored by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Turkish Embassy in Canberra. The event was tied in to Anzac Day and I could not but view it as a somewhat opportunistic plug for tourism using a consensual form of culture as the hook. Rather than a cultural event that investigated why the two countries were dragged into a war between Britain and Germany 100 years ago, this was a classic culture as goodwill ambassador sort of show. While there is certainly a place and audience for this, it can be disappointing when cultural programmes adopt an overly tourist-centred point of view that expects Spain to mean flamenco, Russian to equate with cossack dances and Rumania  gypsy bands. Does the USA mean Patti Smith? Not quite yet, but to a certain older section of the Melbourne public, Smith certainly is the more acceptable face of Old Sam.

We went backstage to see the organ in action. It was a newly refurbished state of the art affair which was mostly tucked away out of view. However, we were lucky enough that it was in use and here the tour got slight messy and interesting. The guide seemed put out that he had to shout over it and that notes and chords, not even music, were being produced, seemingly at random, breaking his flow, and occasionally blowing out the ear wax. I rather liked the way the organ imposed its own unpredictable rhythm upon us; I think tours are more interesting when they go ever so slightly wrong. Like in the theatre or performance art, it is in these moments, when things go off-script, that you see another level of the reality that underpins the performance. In this case it was nothing drastic; my guide simply liked things under control and didn't like raising his voice. 

The council meeting chambers were lavish in a very old-school British colonial sort of way. If I compare them to the Scottish Parliament, which I recently visited, they make Edinburgh's debating chambers look like a Meccano set. My guide was keen to tell me that The Queen had visited the building and he showed me an array of flags denoting other members of the Royal Family who had also graced it with their presence. I couldn't quite figure out if this was because he had picked up on my British accent and thought this would appeal to me, whether this was standard information on the tour or if he was himself keen on the monarchy. I didn't have the heart to say I was a republican as he was a nice man and in his stride here.

The one feature that stuck out like a sore thumb was the monitors. I was told that whereas papers were formerly laid out on display on the red desk for examination by all present, today everything is now put onto the screens or given as printouts. The room was, then, a beautiful relic that still had to function in changed times. That, in a sense, was my impression of the Town Hall itself, as a result of taking this tour: it all functioned fine but it had a weight to it that was not carried by the people themselves. My guide was an obliging and knowledgeable chap who did this for his own pleasure and I almost wish I had taken the tour a day or two later when I would have been able to throw more pointed questions at him. Alas, you never exactly know what you're going to get when you step in as a tourist, but if you find yourself in Melbourne this is a place worth stepping into.

Queen Mary University's East End Tour

Today's tour was a little fractured beginning and ending with other tours... maybe it can be called a sandwich tour. The filling, however, is in no doubt, that was an audio tour provided by Queen Mary University of London.  

The sandwich metaphor can be stretched just a little further as I began my evening in search of the Charnel House in Spitalfields which I had been made aware of on a different tour and marked on the map as occupying the same spot as Costa. Today I found it and to my surprise it is not right to call it the Costa Charnel House, it is much more the Pret a Manger Charnel House, as you can see in the picture. There do seem to be an inordinate number of these sandwich stores in the city.

The Queen Mary University East End Tour began round the corner at Liverpool Street Station. There is something very appealing about starting tours at stations as they are portals full of potential and generally not observed closely enough since people are usually in a hurry coming and going. To encourage this transitory nature, there are, apparently, sonic devices called MOSQUITOS that emit a sound that is particularly annoying to people under 25. These devices are used (by people over 25 we can safely assume) to discourage gangs from congregating and Liverpool Street Station is meant to be one of the stations that has this ultra-sonic sound played as a constant. I was unable to hear it and so simply put on my earphones and started the audio recording. The Queen Mary Tour told me to exit via the Broadgate escalator and in this respect  treated the station much like everybody else: a non-place that leads you elsewhere.

The instructions were at first quite clear and spoken by a woman who articulated very thoroughly. She told me to go down this lane, which I did, and that is where the tour got going with some descriptions of the narrow passage. The narrator acted as the host and from time to time introduced lecturers from Queen Mary who would speak on their specialist topics. Here for example there was, if I remember correctly, a professor talking about how the East End was viewed as being a terrible place full of crime and social problems. The fact that the experts were from different departments of Queen Mary made it clear to me that this tour was an inter-disciplinary initiative bringing together the likes of the English department with the Geography department. This was interesting in that it demonstrated how geographically framed tours (e.g. an East End Tour) by their nature tend to dip into different subjects; a bit of history, a bit of politics, a bit of geography and, why not, a bit of literature. Still, there was an assumption about what it was interesting to talk about and this mostly meant talking about the past. A tour that mixed two disciplines and did not take such a historical frame would be far more curious indeed. You could mix, for example, crime and botany and while you'd have two rather separate streams of information you'd probably find some points where they informed one another.

The tour took me to many familiar spots, such as Petticoat Lane Market. I'm not going to refer back to the audio so I can be clear about what was said, I think it is better to rely on memory so that what I write here is what is remembered, the impressions the tour left me with. Here then, I think I was told that this was one of London's oldest markets. I seem to remember they added some market sound effects too: audio doubling.

I passed Happy Days fish and chip shop which is one of the Jack the Ripper sites and I remember Barnaby, the guide on Ripping Yarns Tour, saying they do really good fish and chips. He was absolutely right. With a bag of chips in hand, I continued my tour.

Once again I got the immigrant story of the area and it was the Jewish Soup Kitchen that was the site for the telling of the story this time round. The tone was quite high and modestly academic with quotes from period sources and considered commentary. The story was, however, identical to that told on regular tourist tours.

Because this tour was going over well trodden ground, I interested myself by looking at the sites obliquely, such as at this 'designated locked site' on the side of Christ Church. I listened obediently to the story then to the instructions telling me where the next listening point was and then stopped the recording and made my way there. This form of engagement with the tour was less intense than a guided tour during which you are still more part of a tour during those marches between locations and it was certainly much less intensive than the immersive Sound Map Tour which surrounds you from start to finish.

True to form the tour took in the Brick Lane Mosque and there I heard about its history, as I had on almost every other tour that comes this way. It might be necessary to map the points that appear on multiple tours and those that only feature on a single tour. A specialist tour of tours would try to connect the single use points whereas a generalist tour of tours would select only points that feature on at least two or three tours. What is nice to observe are points that feature in multiple tours and which are talked about in completely different ways, like SO Gallery on Brick Lane which combines Jewish heritage and contemporary art.

The tour took me to the park where there was a story about discrimination against  Bangladeshis in the 70s. The story finished in a curious way. The narrator said, "if you want to end your tour now, go to Aldgate East Tube station over the road." She didn't go so far as to say, "you'd be a mug to continue" but there was something of a sense of "you've seen the best of it" in her tone of voice. Taking this a step further I imagine a tour in which you are repeatedly invited to finish it at one point after another and in a variety of ways. 

There next followed a long walk from the park to Whitechapel during which there were no recordings. This is more or less that same problem that the Walk The Line Tour faced: this stretch of road is not obviously interesting. I therefore had to think of the young lady on the Chinese tour bus I previously mentioned who pointed out a TESCO whenever she passed one. Since there is this one on the route, I do so in memory of her. I was starting to think I should have taken the narrator's advice and quit while I was ahead.

 

I also noticed several stores with signs like this: 

Money Transfer | Job Centre | Travels & Tours | Hajj & Umrah 

This got me thinking about pilgrimage and hajj as a tour. It's a huge topic that I'll have to return to at some point, hopefully in the context of a pilgrimage site or tour. Briefly though, I remember visiting Lourdes in Southern France and being surprised at how this Catholic pilgrimage destination managed to be simultaneously kitsch and impressive. I also remember hearing about virtual Hajj that was a big story a while back. When Second Life was in its prime you could send your avatar on pilgrimage to Mecca and I seem to remember other forms of virtual pilgrimage too. More research that needs to be done!

I downloaded the MP3 audio files and PDF map onto my phone but I found that my phone would not open the map file. This meant I was reliant on the audio instructions to find my way. By about two thirds of the way through, the audio instructions started becoming vague and I had to start guessing and looking around to make sure I was on the right path. As there was no street sign to indicate Mile End Road, for example, I had to scan the business plates till I found this one confirming I was on the right road.

The tour took me to progressively less and less glamorous locations such as this slither of green space that used to be important for meetings and public speaking. It is hard to imagine that happening now. You'd have to shout over the buses that roar past and the relentless flow of Mile End Road.  

The nadir moment of the tour for me came when I realised I must have completely missed one of the audio stops. I could not see anything like the place I was looking for and so I just pressed PLAY and listened to the next track hoping I could get a clearer picture of the place from the recording. I found myself listening to a discourse on geometry and social values while looking into Topps Tiles. At this point I realised I might as well make what I will of the tour and find my own sense in it. This was actually quite a liberating moment as I stopped feeling like I was making a mistake but instead allowed it all to be experience that could be interpreted however I wished.

Cut adrift then, I came to SFC (Stepney Fried Chicken) nestled alongside Stepney Green tube station. While I might smile at the woman who maps the country with TESCO I must admit I have my own version of this with the fried chicken outlets that proliferate in London. I used to take pictures of their signs and after some months had quite a collection. There is a nice transference of signifiers in these as they are basically copying KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) which in turn is probably a copy of something else, and substituting Kentucky with another location, usually plucked from the American South. Some however are resolutely local like SFC and then there are the PFCs (Perfect Fried Chicken) which in turn have their imitators who copy the PFC logo but insist they are Philadelphia Fried Chicken. Where the copy of the copy will go next is anyone's guess...

Making my way back to Liverpool Street I passed the locations I missed towards the end of the Queen Mary Tour and saw how I managed to miss them. I have to admit it did not feel like any great loss as I listened to the information anyway, none of which was of a nature that depended on being there. When I arrived back in The City I came across another tour of sorts, I was barged aside by a trail of Santa Claus clad joggers. I passed them twice in fact and their distinctive costumes made them stand out in the street. Earlier in the day I had read about a City of London run and now I was amidst another group making their high speed tour of The City. It is debatable to what degree a race like this is really a tour but for me it is enough that they make this formalised circuit of the City as a group. 

I wondered what the route of their tour was and where they would finish and I guessed it must be nearby as some of them looked like they were at breaking point. I opted for Spitalfields Market, made my way there and sure enough I found a large number of city workers in Santa outfits eating mince pies and drinking mulled wine. I also saw them being timed and something of the charity operation they were doing this for. So the way this 5K race works is that the runners represent their companies and both the individual winners and fastest company teams are awarded a prize, symbolic I suppose, on a small podium. While I have a general sympathy for people doing daft things in public the Santa outfit has become a bit overused in my opinion; I saw a similar gathering of jogging Santas last year in Portsmouth, I've seen Santa dressed pub crawls and the goodwill that the costume typically invokes has also been used by Fathers For Justice who have campaigned in Santa outfits on several occasions. Maybe what I mean by this is simply that it has become ever so slightly ordinary.