Inside Out Dorset Festival: The Alternative Tour

Yesterday I was putting the finishing touches on The Alternative Tour for Inside Out Festival. The day began with some last minute editing to get the timings precise for the audio tour element. This is modestly ambitious in that I have tried to avoid some of the things that I have often been annoyed by when taking audio tours. 

The principal one of these annoyances is the structure of most audio tours whereby you look at the map, walk to number 1, press play and listen. When that's finished you look at the map, go to number 2, press play and so on. I instead made this tour continuous so that you it walks with the listener throughout, both giving the guiding directions and the commentary. This way makes for a shorter, more intensive sort of audio tour. It does however take quite some work to get there.

This is the slightly glazed look I had when done with the recording and editing. The village  was empty then and has since been transformed by the festival infrastructure; there is some serious event management going on. One part of me would prefer to see the place in a quieter way but I know that if you have 2000 people coming, you need to be able to deal with them, and their cars, which now swell fields designated as temporary parking spaces.

I am on a three performance a day schedule, which is pretty heavy, particularly as the tour is a little longer than anticipated, even though it only uses nine locations. It covers Nelson, 1983, The Tour de Manche, lost Danish students, an alcoholic cricket team, an electric bike tour, stones circles, the Parish book, genealogy and magic mushrooms! Not bad for 40 minutes.

I did manage to see some of the other work in the festival such this giant hare. It is very nice to see it transform as you approach it from the side. At first it is an abstract shape but as the position shifts it comes into focus and reveals itself fully. Nice. There's plenty more going on too, so if you are in Dorset do pop down this weekend.

The Roman Baths of Bath Tour: one cup is enough

There is a hierarchy of attractions in Bath and at the top sits the Roman Baths. The heritage tours had already primed me with some information on the baths as they are central to the city's history and even name; it was now time to see how they are presented.

I joined the queue that snaked around the side of the building and listened to this busker who is something of a mainstay of Bath city centre right now. He's not bad at all and he kicked off a retro set with Norwegian Wood. The skeleton on the pushbike is Bizarre Bath advertising and to the left and out of the picture was a Falun Gong lady doing her stuff protesting at the Chinese government. We crept forwards to The Who, past the anti-Trident Missile protest beside the Abbey and finally into the Roman Baths' reception hall. 

The ticket is not cheap but it did come with a free audio guide available in several languages. The way it works is at points around the building there are signs which indicate which audio track to listen to. Here, for example, when I entered 85 into the handset it gave me the standard description of what was in front of me. If I had a German, French or Japanese handset it would have done the same in those languages. Additionally, I could then press 12 and listen to a Bill Bryson commentary, available in English only, and if that was not enough there was a further additional description for the English and French handsets that could be summoned up by tapping in 113. That meant that I could listen to three different tracks about the same location and being conscientious I started off doing just that. 

Because there was A) no live guide to lead us around and B) the audio tracks were specific to each spot and not inscribed within a tour that placed them in a clear narrative, they were isolated nodes of information. There were these great big arrows that went some way to directing us but we were more or less left to it.

This brought me round to the top level, which seemed to be the best place to get a selfie in front of the water. It's a pretty location and is far enough set back from the main bath that you can get it all in the frame. I'd be interested to know what percentage of photos taken in different locations around the world are selfies, that would make for a quite unusual map of narcissism. These Roman Baths would not be anywhere near top: it is not iconic enough and it is also relatively sober in tone. The most popular selfie site worldwide by volume is, according to CNN, the Eiffel Tower with Disney World and Disney Land also in the top ten. This answer was based on Instagram research but I bet if they used a Chinese or Indian photo sharing platform they'd come up with a different answer.

Over on the other side of the wall there was an excellent view back into square where I noticed that the Falun Gong lady had by now been joined by a man in a shiny yellow suit. The music had moved onto Imagine by John Lennon which was a stark soundtrack to the posters on organ harvesting and a tangential one to Bill Bryson rabbiting on about the layers of history in the baths. I am probably extra sensitive to this issue of sound but in an open air space it really does make a difference what is playing in the background: while listening to Bryson I was taken away to The Dakota for a moment and reimagine Lennon being gunned down outside the building in 1980. I felt that the Bryson recording was rather disappointing in general as I had thought there would be more of the gentle irony that characterises his travel writing. It sounded to me as if he had been invited to record his commentary in order to add a celebrity name to the audio guides but he wasn't given enough time to develop anything of substance, he was more or less busking it and giving on the spot feedback. Speaking for myself, the levels of ironies and webs of ideas that I can get from visiting a place only become separated and more distinct with a bit of time to reflect upon what it is that I have seen.

The next stage of the trip around the baths took us down into the modern museum. This was a big contrast to the top level as it was very new and ever so precisely lit. They had good quality models like this one which showed what the Roman baths would have looked like. I would have also liked to have had a model of the contemporary site to see how the two compare. That way I could admire little model tourists queuing to get in, model buskers and model protesters, model groups taking selfies in front of the baths and then crowding around a model of the contemporary site looking down onto their tiny model selves. 

This looks like a cinema but the tourists are actually looking at a number of stone carvings that have been hung on the wall in front of them and which are being described in detail on their audio guides. It was a rather neat way to borrow the architecture of the cinema so as to encourage people to sit and take their time to listen to the commentary. If this were simply a standing exhibit, there might only be five or six people here.

There were also a number of videos dotted around the museum and the audio guide provided the dialogue for them. The problem here of course is how to make it OK that the audio guide's dialogue does not synchronise with the image, because you drop into the film sequence randomly. You wouldn't do this with a Tarkovsky movie but here they kept the videos short and focussed around a single issue so it more or less worked.  

The remains of the Roman baths are in much better condition here than is typical for Roman sites in the UK and the fact that they has been overlaid with other layers of English history only adds to them. What is also true is that the museum has been very good at making the most of the fragments that they've found. This altar is a case in point. They have very little of it but have given the impression of a large significant altar by adding the missing sections without trying to trick you with fake antiques. The overall effect is to make the fragments appear much more valuable by conveying the scale of the original object, which is usually lost. It's a smart piece of display and is quite typical for this museum which has a uniformly high level of museology.

Just as I was getting tired of juggling between the assorted audio descriptions and was about to give up on them, I saw a live guide showing people around the baths. My interest picked up again and I followed him as he showed the bathing rooms and explained how they were constructed and used. While the general content of what he was saying was no different from the audio guide, the effect was world's apart. When, for example, he saw you looking at the green coloured water, he told you why it is that colour and advised you not to touch it, though around the sides of the bath many people were doing precisely that, dipping their fingers in to see just how warm this natural spring was. When he talked about the hills that the water comes from, a gesture accompanied his words and it all made fell into place. He showed us an oil scraper, passed it around, sand for a moment I wondered if he would take his clothes off, rub himself in olive oil and demonstrate it, but alas that would be going too far. This did get me imagining tours where the demonstrations went way too far: baths where the guides undress, a medieval torture chamber where the visitors are stretched on the rack and prison where you are locked up for a week.

I love these sort of pictures so much more than selfies. This one reminds me of the pictures taken of the African students in China on The Pingyao Tour. This one records not only a cross-cultural meeting but it is also a pleasingly ahistorical shot. I've so far resisted the dressing up in a historical costume and standing in front of a historical site type of shot but it might be time to jump in. I did get a nice one of me standing beside the Jane Austin waxwork the other day, my equivalent to this gentleman's Roman shot. I think these photos are extremely important as they shape the way people look at, encounter and remember these sites.

Towards the end of the tour there is a fountain where you can help yourself to the supposedly curative water. It is not exactly a pleasant brew but I was preparing myself for something truly vile so was ever so slightly relieved that it didn't make me naueous. And lo and behold, as I write this now, I can  vouch for it: my leprosy has cleared up completely! That at least was the story that created such a buzz around Bath in the 18th Century and shot the city into the limelight. Apparently, you can also sample this water in the pump room upstairs, a smart Georgian cafe popular with tourists.  

If the busker upstairs were to have sung Across The Universe while I was looking at this pool that glitters like the Milky Way it would have been a fitting end to the tour but we were buried inside the complex and he was out of earshot. The water is supposedly rich in minerals, particularly  iron, and this bath is rich in metal all right, the glittering is the from coins visitors toss into the pool. And it is no surprise they do so as the baths are rather special and I can understand why they pull in over a million punters a years. There is not so much to say from a tour point of view, the audio and live tour simply do an efficient job at introducing and leading you round the site. With such a bulk of visitors it is hard to imagine it being done in any other way and. The visitors themselves are not infrequently on tours of their own, such as an English language school's day trip. They will experience the baths as a tour within a tour and that's probably where the more far out tour stories are to be found.

The People Behind the Plaques Tours: the famous and the forgotten

These two tours of Bath, one of the centre and one around the Royal Crescent, were based upon the historic plaques on the sides of buildings indicating who lived there. The idea was to understand more about these people, some of whom are well-known and others who have sunk into obscurity. 

These tours were organised by the Mayor's Honorary Guides who have been in existence for 80 years so they themselves are a bit of the city's history too. The two complimentary tours I went on were part of a week of one-off tours given to mark the guide's 80th anniversary. The guides do this for pleasure and neither ask for nor receive payment for showing visitors around the city. They are self-organising and seem to be mostly made up of older people who know their city and have the time to perform this role. 

The tour began with a map of plaques drawn up by the honorary guide's founder. It turns out that some of the plaques are not in the correct locations and some notables have more than one plaque, as they stayed in multiple properties. The group was led by no less than three guides who managed to share the work remarkably well. When I compare this with the Dalston Conservation Tour which was given by two guides speaking at cross purposes, this tour was wholly harmonious. Indeed, because this was a one-off tour and a significant number of the audience were themselves honorary guides, the spirit was more that of assisting and chipping in with information as and when it seemed relevant. It was also an opportunity for the guides to meet one another on a social level so it fulfilled this role and at the end I discovered it had a greater significance again. A well-respected honorary guide had planned this 'people behind the plaques walk' and he had passed away last year. These walks were a way to honour his memory by realising his proposed series of walking tours. In this way, there was a much deeper motivation behind giving these tours than most typical city tours, though this remained understated and the focus was very much on the plaques, people and their stories. 

A nice moment at the beginning was gaining access to the usually locked courtyard of Ralph Allen's city house. It was clearly a lost courtyard from the abundant weeds that were growing between the cracks in the paving slabs. While the story of the man was quite familiar to most, the location offered a new twist.

In general the plaques are made of bronze and were put up in the first half of the 20th Century. This one is an exception and is a more recent one. There are some complications around putting up new ones and some property owners do not want such plaques on their walls. This means that this record of the great and good is more or less fixed in time with history ending in the Victorian era. To compensate for this the guides did stop in front of some properties without plaques and talk about who had lived inside, which made for a balanced story but I should admit I was curious about the plaques themselves and what they connoted. Seeing as they reflect a historical idea of fame, which today equals celebrity, there may be some interest in testing these boundaries and sticking to the bronze plaques would do just that.

And there was a further type of modern plaque we came across, this blue circular affair for local legend Sally Lunn. I like the fact that most cities have one or two characters like this: they are a part of the story of the city and may indeed reach iconic status yet are completely unknown elsewhere. When you arrive you are told about them as if they are common knowledge and you have to take it all in faith. When you leave, you leave these personalities at the city gate, their significance lying solely in the city. As such, these figures offer quite some potential for invention and myth making.

 

Nelson's plaque was an interesting stop. I am familiar with him as the great naval commander who secured victory at Trafalgar at the cost of his life. This is the story that has been drummed into me since my childhood visits to HMS Victory. Indeed I'm still hearing it through my current research in South Dorset, which lies on The Trafalgar Way and was home to Hardy of “kiss me Hardy”. How refreshing it was then to hear another side of him, namely, Nelson the shameless rogue. In this way the tour managed to retain some interest in an overly famous person and it did so through taking the point of view of his wife who, it was said, he abandoned in Bath. 

The current life of the buildings on the Royal Crescent was not gone into at all as it is not yet plaque-worthy and that was a big question hanging over the tour for me, given my focus on the contemporary. The hotel behind was going about its highly-priced business and I heard on the bus tour yesterday that John Cleese was now living on the Royal Crescent. We occasionally saw someone enter or exit a door but they were like ghosts from the future who had no part to play in the tour. I had been interested a couple of years ago in making a performance about the usage of history in the present and on the basis of my observations in Bath so far I may be able to draw upon quite a number of that work's threads here. I like it when stalled ideas turn out to not be stalled at all but merely dormant, waiting for the occasion.   

The next plaques were located on the square at the end of the short road in the background. We didn't bother crossing the road and walking over there, however, and this indicated to me that the relationship between the stories and the precise locations was not that strong, it was more or less enough that these people lived in Bath but the exact building and how it looks today were for the most part irrelevant. This got me wondering whether it was necessary to make this walk at all if we weren't going to visit the precise locations referenced. I came the conclusion that it was necessary, not because the sites were significant to the storytelling but because this tour was a vehicle to bring people together in a series of attractive public spaces. It would be a very different event if it took place in a meeting room.

A final plaque and a short history of the postal service. I had never realised that Bath played an instrumental role in the setting up of the country's postal service and the city remains a stamp collector's paradise. It is definitely a niche interest but I suspect there must be a tour connected to the post service. That is a tour I will have to search out and report back on next.  

The Bath Bus Tour: City Sightseeing automaton guides

The City Sightseeing bus tour of Bath runs along two routes: the first circles around the city-centre and the second climbs up the hills so that you can get a view over the city. This is exactly the same as the Stuttgart bus tour which I have written about previously. Having two routes instead of a single longer ride means they each of the routes has a clearer basic theme and neither of them takes too long: they last about 45 minutes each.    

There was live commentary in English but no possibility of listening to it using any of the other languages indicated. I don't know if these were not playing because there was a live guide but it did mean that some of the people on the bus looked confused and then ignored the commentary, taking the bus simply as an open top bus ride, which can be a pleasant thing in itself. Unlike Stuttgart, whose tourist attractions are scattered over a large area, Bath's attractions are clustered in the city centre with relatively few points of interest that far out. The stop button was used on just one occasion. There is indeed less point in having a tourist bus in Bath as the city is highly suitable for walking tours. The bus therefore does not so much act as a transport service getting tourists to and from the attractions, it functions as a guide imparting knowledge to those who don't like walking.

Like in Stuttgart, art had a low position in the commentary. The art gallery was described not by what it currently does but by the fact it is free and what the building used to be. I get the impression that unless this sort of bus tour takes place in a dedicated 'city of culture', it is assumed that tourists don't have a great deal of interest in art. Added to that is the not insignificant fact that the bus moves much more quickly than a walking tour which means descriptions tend to be brief and to the point. There is simply no time for art.

Because it was mid-summer and the trees were full of leaves, it was hard to see through them and admire any of the stunning views that the guide was talking about.

As has been the case with all of the other Bath tours I've taken, the guides were somewhat older in age as indeed were most of the passengers, except for a Thai family who were taking a lot of photos. 

The suburban hill bus came to a rest and I changed onto the city-centre bus. It pulled away, the guide began to intone and settled into a rhythm. His commentary mixed significant and interesting details about the city with some pretty tedious information that seemed of little relevance. Granted, what is considered interesting and what is not, is highly subjective and I'd expect there to be some things of greater and some of lesser interest to me. That understood, I felt that there were points where the commentary continued not because there was anything interesting left to say but merely to cover the silence. For example we'd go from a story about Queen Victoria feeling snubbed by Bath to the opening of a new Primark. This has in fact rather inspired me with my imagination taking this to its natural conclusion: the deadpan delivery of a radically flattened order of knowledge in which everything is of precisely equal value. If nothing else, there is some good comedy potential here.

The historical background was more than a little messy. I learnt that under Henry VIII, England moved away from the Catholics and back to the Church of England, even though I rather remember it was he who founded that church in the first place. Meanwhile, a seagull did its business. We got a lot into celebrities, like Dickens who is connected to this pub, and celebrity chefs, who I very much doubt are connected to it. It seems pretty easy to get into historical figures here as not only did many live here but a great many more visited. When you enlarge the pool to include famous people paid a visit to Bath you practically all people of significance from the 18th century as this was the society holiday and gambling spot.

The weather was great, maybe even a bit too hot so I was sheltering under the covered area at the front of the top deck, as was the guide. This basic arrangement of the seats and space is awkward as it leaves the guide facing in the same direction as the passengers. As a result of this it was difficult for him to make any real connection with the public so, on my tour, he simply talked off into space. That must be a difficult thing to do for hours and hours on end and I could tell he was struggling to stay focussed. Finally he seemed to drift into autopilot, repeating the same information time and again to nobody in particular.

Some final things I spotted today: Fun For Less Tours. If I see them again I'll have to follow them and see whether they take people into the Weatherspoons for a drink, and then visit the Pondland and Primark for shopping.

And second, I noticed this pub map of Bath that proposes several routes for a pub crawl. Actually, the routes are not precisely that as they mostly contain too many pubs to make a drink in each feasible. Such a map which did offer distinct pub crawl routes with options for additional elements might be a nice but complicated work. A definite labour of love. This  map makes me think of the London Underground map and of the Bath's relationship with the capital. I sense a degree of complicity with London as opposed to the hostility that is often manifest in my home city of Portsmouth. I learnt, for example, that the 2004 film Vanity Fair was filmed in Bath, not London where the novel is set. In the city centre there is a shop called London Camera Exchange. Such a shop would rapidly go out of business in Portsmouth if it didn't change its name.

Bringing these thoughts together, I am also reminded of a Victoria Line pub crawl I heard about. The Victoria Line is the only proper line (i.e. not Waterloo and City line) on which it is possible to hold a terminus to terminus pub crawl. the idea is you start at Walthamstow Central, have a drink in a nearby pub, duck down into the tube, take it one stop, emerge for a drink and then repeat this process till you make your sozzled way to Brixton. That's another tour for another day, and most probably, another person.

The Tour of All Tours at the Bookwork Literary Festival, Beijing 2014

Here are some pictures from the performance of The Tour of All Tours in Beijing, presented as part of the Bookworm Literary Festival 2014.

The tour started in the bookworm itself with a review of an audio tour around the station area.  

The tours that were covered were very different with a good number of them from other cities. The details were smoothed over so as to make it ambiguous whether this was a tour of Beijing or a projection of the tourist gaze. The one exception that would not allow itself to be smoothed over was the 'Occupy Beijing Tour'. This was so unlikely that it was interesting in its own right in so far as it described a tour that would not be permitted. Standing in front of the Bank of China, we started to look a little like the tour we were describing. 

Rather than describing this performance, something best left to someone watching it, it is more interesting to describe how it seemed to function. The format of the tour, even with the caveat of it being an art tour, brings with it a way of watching and participating. That and the great weather meant for a laid back audience.

The group was made up more of Westerners than of Chinese spectators, so we attracted a bit of attention in our own right as a minor spectacle. The hat no doubt helped.

It was great to be able to talk about The Olympics and East London and make comparisons between Hackney Wick and Sanlitun, an area that was developed significantly ahead of the games. Certain structural similarities connect the areas such as the displacement of poor people and their not very profitable businesses.

I enjoy those moments in the tours between stops when you talk in a more informal way with the spectators. I have to retain a performance sensitivity yet engage with people in an unforced manner. It is in these moments that you realise there is no escape from performing. The mask of sincerity is usually the best option. 

Something I was not counting on happened. Taking the group through Yashow Market, I lost 2 or 3 people as they were spirited away into shopping mode upon seeing a dress they liked the look of. That is when I realised that it is not just me who engages in the event in more ways than one but so to do the spectators: as tourist, as art viewer, as shopper and as self, to name but four. As for the baby, he was probably the most centred of us all and hadn't leant the different roles he could play in this game of being the tourist.

The Walk Eat Talk Eat Tour: come on an empty stomach

I should begin by first making my excuses for this being a tour taken well over a week ago that has only now made it online. I relocated to Beijing while writing this one up and this blog is blocked there along with a great many other seditious online publications, so it has taken a little while to figure out how to get around this impasse. I couldn’t pass this tour off as yesterday’s as it began with a topical sales pitch in Shoreditch Station, where I had arranged to meet my guide. A young man and woman from Beauty Group were stopping passers by and telling them they were lucky enough to be one of the first 25 customers of the morning and could thus take advantage of a tremendous cosmetics offer. Yes, for just £35 I could have walked away with a little black bag bristling with cosmetics that would otherwise have cost me over £100, a perfect Valentine’s Day present, etc. She did her best and I watched as she demonstrated the various pastes, powders, glosses and pencils but my heart wasn’t in it. It was still a £35 sale and when I saw the two of them still there over two hours later I started to doubt the ‘first 25 customers’ line and suspected it was more a device to inject a sense of urgency and exclusivity into what, for me, was at best an only moderately interesting offer.

The station was not only animated by Beauty Group, there was also a tour group assembling there and it was only after they departed that I found my guide Charli who was sporting a purple Walk Eat Talk Eat jacket. She led me out, past the group who had now descended fully into the history of old Shoreditch, and onto Bethnal Green Road. We introduced ourselves and it turned out I had some choices and options of where my tour would take me. Not eating meat this meant avoiding some places but with so many other options available I was not short of places to talk and eat.

Our first stop was bunnychow a South African themed fast-food outlet in Box Park. We got started straight away ordering a ‘Boston Beans’, a hollowed-out bread roll filled with beans, spinach and halloumi cheese served in a box. It was rather good and I started to regret having eaten that porridge for breakfast as I was only slightly hungry and if we were setting out at this pace and there were still 4 or 5 stops to come I knew I’d be struggling soon. This was not symbolic food or light tasting to accompany a story, this was the real deal and I was tucking into a second breakfast.

We then got talking to the chef who told us about the food, its origins, how he came to be making it and about the business here in Shoreditch. This got us onto the crossover between street food and restaurants, the festival circuit and much more besides. It was a pleasure to drop briefly into his world and hear in detail about something I might only otherwise miss entirely. There is something quite nice in general about this structure of tour where you get picked up and dropped in front of a number of people who stop and talk to you for a minute and then carry on about their business while your guide whisks you to the next one.   

Our next stop however did not feature any interviews; we ducked into Albion and I was invited to choose an item from the bakery table. The selection was of familiar British items like scones, macaroons and bakewell tarts but somewhat unfamiliar in that these had been well made elevating them above the Mr Kipling’s box of six. I plumped for the bourbon biscuit.

For a place that is branded as British, Albion seemed surprisingly continental European in tone which, I should add, I see as no bad thing. The espresso machine jumped out at me and made me have to ask, “what is British food?” Coffee, as I heard in a previous tour, has a longer history in Britain than tea so in a sense coffee is a very solid part of the British tradition as it has been consumed in this country for many hundreds of years. On the other hand, the beans are grown far away with packets sporting labels like ‘Produce of Kenya’ and coffee culture has only recently been re-embraced here in the UK where until fifteen years ago, it was pretty much instant coffee or nothing. What’s more, the idea of Britain is itself a historical construct; in the stone age, people ate and drank, not cappuccinos I suppose, but our Neolithic tribes consumed something and people were not busy with the idea of Britain let alone British food, that came much later. The idea of Britain that seems to be most in circulation today is one that is historically located in the period of the British Empire. Here in Albion they were improvising upon this theme but doing so in a contemporary way, a far cry from the Britain of the 1970s and 80s that I grew up in, a land of luncheon meat, spam and inedible school dinners. Today’s spam is electronic and today’s Britain articulated in relation to Europe.

Stopping outside on the street the focus of the tour now switched to history and I was told about Jack London’s visit here at the turn of the century and how Thomas Cook refused to offer him a tour so much was this considered a no go zone for respectable persons. Yes, at the height of empire some parts of the capital remained in desperate poverty. Indeed even the police, so Charli told me, would not venture into this cesspool of crime and deprivation. Times have changed! It is a designer shopping and creative industries hub with tour guides a plenty and now, with the Tour of All Tours focused here, it even has its conceptual tour guide, guiding the visitor around the guides. A sign of the beginning of the end? As we went further into The Boundary Estate and I was told about the efforts of early reformers to improve the district I munched on my quite delicious bourbon biscuit and tried to find sense in these multiple impressions and stories. This evaded me as the place IS as ruptured and in flux as all that and a tour that works off this premise will inevitably have to both feed them and tell them some of the stories.

We stopped for street art around Brick Lane but did not linger too long or get deep into the street art scene as the more dedicated tours of it do.

Next stop was a new chocolate shop on Brick Lane. We were meant to talk to the owner but she was in the midst of an involved business call (i.e. an argument) so we simply admired the high-end chocolates and ordered a chilli hot chocolate. This turned out to be another calorie hit with just enough chilli to wake the mouth up but not so much as to destroy the flavour of the chocolate.

Next came the piadina. This is an Italian fast food served up in a van behind Truman’s brewery. This seemed to be a family run outfit with fresh ingredients brought back from Italy every week, I was told.

What made this stop interesting for me was watching the food being made in front of us. It can be fascinating to watch somebody skilled in preparing fast food at work and while this was not so challenging a dish to make it was good to watch the process all the same. There is a rather tasty Beijing egg pancake with coriander, chilli paste and a dried tofu sheet that is made fresh in front of you here and it sends me into the same low-level hypnosis watching the vendors at work.

We made the near obligatory stop outside the mosque to hear about multiculturalism and were stood beside the Bangladeshi sweet shop to check out their offerings. The man in the background is arriving there carrying two trays laden with brightly coloured spirals of sugar and fat. We could have gotten some but I declined already knowing these sweets and feeling rather full from the onslaught so far. It would be interesting to make a calorie count of the tour and see what it came to, to then subtract the amount exerted in walking and discover the net balance. Applying this logic, what would be required to make a calorific neutral walking and eating tour? A stick of celery every 200 meters?  I guess that wouldn’t take on, not even with hardened vegans. This idea of neutrality is nonetheless an appealing one with carbon neutral travel and carbon neutral companies making much of their balancing equations, or I sometimes suspect, cooking of the books.

We sheltered under a coffee stall outside Spitalfields Church as the weather turned properly grim and I got some historical stories about the church and surrounding area. Stepping over the road I ran into Bill Gee by chance, Bill who is co-curating Inside Out Festival in South Dorset where I’m also making a tour for this Summer. It was funny for him to catch me hard at work researching one of my other tours. Walking through the gastronomically homogenized Spitalfields Market (over-run by chain restaurants like Giraffe and Leon) we arrived at another British themed food store A. Gold on Brushfield Street which caters to city workers and proudly displays all the old brands. I got half a scotch egg which I prudently saved for later. One of the themes of the walk is that ‘British food is not half as bad as people make it out to be’ and on the basis of this tour you could definitely agree with this sentiment. Granted, there are horror kitchens up and down the country, millions of people buy ready to microwave slops from supermarkets and you can still pick up a deep fried mars bar, if you know where to look, but that does not change the fact that there is a quality British cuisine and that it is not indelibly bland but actually rather good. The tour used food as the principal hook to get you from place to place and tell stories not just about food but also about the area on the way. While it can sometimes feel a bit split between these two focuses, for most visitors they are only going to ever take one tour of Brick Lane and combining food and local history is a way to make the experience as a whole an agreeable one. I felt that the history of empire and social class loomed large over what I experienced, yet a tour that articulated this in depth would be a very different sort of tour and quite probably not so enjoyable a one. My one piece of advice for would be tourists taking the Walk Eat Talk Eat Tour is to approach this one on an empty stomach, there’s a lot to take in.