The Stockholm Metro Art Tour

Stockholm is busy right now branding itself as The Capital of Scandinavia, a title I can only guess they have seized upon without bothering to consult their neighbours. So, what does the Scandinavian 'capital' have to offer beyond painful prices and Abba nostalgia tours?

For starters, it has free guided tours of its subway's art programme organised by SL, the company who run the trains. The tour began with an introduction to the city's transport network: facts and figures stuff.

We then descended down into the metro, our spritely granny guide leading the way.

She seemed to enjoy guiding us; she told us she had been giving tours of the metro's art for 16 years. Just as it is difficult to maintain a stage show for such a length of time, it is is also very hard to give a tour for such a duration and for it to not become sleepy. Bizarre Bath is one of the rare examples of an old walking tour/show that still feels fresh despite its age, but this tour did not have such vigour: spontaneous it wasn't. Still, we slowly made our way through the station listening to the same story that had been spun out time and time before.

We were to be shown a number of the cave-like subway stations such as this one. The tour only ran to one hour in length and we visited just four stations, however, we learnt that the majority of the 100+ stations in the city feature artworks of one kind or another. In this way the tour was an eye opener as now, after the tour, I continue to look out for the art at each stop.

At the same time as getting a basic art appreciation tour, we also got some background history. The basic story was that the country was more powerful in the past and that not participating in the major world wars of the 20th Century has made the country rich again. 

Since the tour was spread over a number of stations, was interspersed with short metro rides, and the artworks were very different to one another, it was always going to be a difficult tour to hold together and frame through any coherent narrative. The solution of not bothering to develop anything across the tour was of course predictable, but I would have liked to have seen something to elevate it beyond a succession of moments. In situations like this I try to find something of my own to explore but even that largely eluded me till some time later when I got focussed on her hands.

Some of the locations were elaborate and more than a little kitsch. I can imagine this arrangement sinking into the background if I lived in Stockholm, but as a visitor I found it quite amusing.

Others were rather more predictable showing themes like sport or folklore. This is a 3D picture which we were encouraged to explore from both sides. In terms of art appreciation this was quite unlike the tour I took of the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, which aimed to get the public talking about the art themselves. This tour was more of a one way affair in which the guide pointed out the art and made some short comments such as, the footballers in this picture are the Swedish national team from the mid-seventies.

Whilst her face was not particularly expressive and the descriptions of the artworks anodyne, I came to notice that she used here hands a great deal to explain her ideas. I remember once coming across a theory of there being different cultural uses of hand gestures based on some studies in New York City back in the 70s: Italian Americans used their hands for emphasis, Jewish Americans used theirs to indicate the causality of ideas, etc. This got me focussed on her hands trying to figure out how she was using them. For a while, this completely revived my flagging interest in the tour. If I were to describe her hands I'd say she mostly used them to draw maps and demonstrate physical processes such as how layers of concrete and paint are put together, though now and again she was doing other things with them too. In fact, once I started noticing her hands and the two chunky blue rings she wore, I got far more interested in looking at them than at her face or even at the art itself. In this respect she reminded me of Jeff Goldblum who, in my opinion, has the most interesting hands in Hollywood and who can make a Spielberg movie watchable simply on account of his gesticulation.

One of the more impressive works was a large-scale piece that took up a major intersection of the subway. We were told that the figures were all based on real people.

She made a point of how even many Stockholm residents were not aware of some of the art works, such as this black trumpet on black tiles. I like subtlety and believe there should be more space for it in public art, but this struck me as something else. It looked to me like a not so interesting decorative art work that was largely invisible to the casual viewer. Maybe there are levels that escape me here but I had to think back to a conversation I had earlier in the day with a choreographer living in Stockholm about the generous level of public financial support for the arts in Sweden. We were having this conversation as we both came from places with much less public financial support and we were caught in the dilemma of both admiring it, and in his case benefitting from it, yet also doubting its effectiveness in producing great, or even half-reasonable, art. The old theory goes that if you want the great art you need to also have the depressingly mediocre and the downright terrible art too: any head requires a body.

These doubts didn't seem reflected in our guide's commentary, however, it was upbeat about the art right down to this final scratching on concrete with which the tour came to end. My overall feeling was that the tour could have been a great deal more dynamic and it was popular mostly because it was a rare free tourist activity in an otherwise over-expensive and under-exciting city. That said, there is always something to enjoy if you look hard enough and her hands really made the tour for me. There are more tours to come, however, so maybe the city has some unexpected delights waiting around the other side of the proverbial corner. 

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 Sanlitun Tour: a conceptual tour of Beijing's tours

This blocking of the blog from within China is why there have been fewer postings of late and that is a pity as there has been plenty to write about. The tour to The Great Wall was very silly and they managed to make something that could have been quite beautiful and impressive a great deal less than what it is. On the other hand, the way the day unfolded and the differences between Chinese coach tours and those I am more familiar with was so vast that it was worthy of a study unto itself. 

Last weekend I gave the first Tour of Tours here in China for the Bookworm's Literary Festival and it went really well. The smog did not interfere, the weather was finally warm and it was a pleasure to be outside, something that has not been the case for a while. That helped enormously. The tour was a particularly conceptual one as there are no real tours that I took of the area and which I could report on. Everything was referring to something else or was a projection of another location onto Sanlitun. As such it made for an unusual sort of tour with the weight falling on talking about tours. We passed through Yashow Market a place bristling with fake branded products and lost a few people there, such is the danger of passing through a shopping place. In all however, it was a good start to Beijing tours and one that will be built upon in the coming months.

Advance notice now about workshops that will be given on performing in public space using guiding principles. There will be workshops in Beijing in May and in London in July, others to be announced.    

The Haunted Holborn Tour

Finally, in the week running up to Halloween I made it round to taking a ghost tour, and it's about time too as I have felt this is a tour experience I have lacked. The tour was free and offered by gotomidtown a Business Improvement District whose package includes street rangers in uniforms and, more originally, guides.   

They have an information point outside Holborn Tube station and this acts as the meeting point for the tour. Note the adoption of the i for information. 

As it was a busy place the guide used amplification. I first encountered these little amps when taking a guided tour in Souther China around some UNESCO sites that were inundated with guides and people selling stuff. To cut through the noise the guides all used these, which of course significantly contributed to the acoustic arms race. Here in Holborn it was useful as the traffic and crowds would have been a bit much to shout over.

There must have been about 25 of us taking the tour and we had to follow our guide through the lunchtime crowds. The timing was tricky not only on account of the bustle but also because of the subject matter. Evening must work far better for ghost tours I imagine. There was no real chance of crating a spooky atmosphere here, indeed the guide didn't even try. He related the stories with considerable distance saying "some people believe this" rather than just telling the story like it happened. This sitting on the fence didn't offer him anything more as a position to narrate from; it is obvious that not everybody believes in ghosts. By the end I was wishing he was in some sort of costume and making an effort to ham it up and scare us.

While waving us on I noticed he was holding these cards which had his script on them, complete with highlighted sections. It is generally a little disappointing to have a guide working from a script and ours here was at least only referring to these cards for dates and facts. What was revealing however was when we arrived at the former entrance to The British Museum underground station. Here he began by reading from a card that had the construction details and dates of this former tube station. These were given in a standardised history tour format. He then moved on from that card and onto a new card which was written with the idea of a ghost tour and not an architectural tour and which contained the story of a wailing Egyptian mummy. My guess is the architectural card belonged to a different tour and was used to introduce the location on the ghost tour. Whist only slightly jarring it did make me wonder about this way of structuring knowledge. It reminded me of wikipedia in the sense that each topic has a discrete entry and you bring your own context and narrative path to the reading and understanding of it. Rather than smoothing over the cracks resulting from the different source materials that the tour's narrative was drawn from this crack was left unintentionally visible. Rather than simply overlooking this minor mistake I feel that there may be something interesting in it if it is enlarged and made deliberate. It makes me wonder if this compartmentalised approach to applying facts could itself become a principle for a tour.

After having taken the ghost tour it was my turn to play guide. The same evening I was scheduled to give a tour around Bloomsbury to a class of students from Birkbeck College. I had neither the time nor inclination to research a Bloomsbury tour so I conducted a little experiment. I decided upon a simple route, looked at what was around and then projected the stories of tours that I had taken elsewhere onto the locations I found in Bloomsbury. I added to these the ghost tour that I had taken earlier and one or two other tours I happen to know about such as the Jehovah's Witness British Museum Tour, so that there was a collection of true and false tours. An example of a false tour was my treatment of The Original Tour, a bus tour which I projected the story of another bus tour The Stuttgart Tour onto.

The Original Tour is in fact interesting for me more generally. I am studying the maps of these bus tours as I will be developing a tour around Shoreditch for 2014 (more on this later) and want to include a bus tour within those I cite. It won't be The Original Tour as the nearest they go is Tower Bridge, following a route that is depressingly similar to the 2012 Olympic Marathon route after the original route through East London was controversially substituted to the sightseeing route.

A curious quality that most of these bus tours have is that they are hop-on and hop-off. This is another way in which the narrative of the journey is flattened as it is impossible to write a beginning, middle and end into such a structure if it is meant to be experienced in that order. What you get instead is an endless stream of touristic information.  

I have noticed that my review of the Sex Tour of Stuttgart is quite popular and tends to get more hits than other blog posts. I'm not sure if this is because people already reading the blog see a list of blog entries and that one pops out at them or if the readers are sex tourists who stumbled across it by accident but one way or another it is a popular subject. I therefore decided to dust it off and apply it to Russel Square. This started with the phone boxes and their prostitute cards which offered the opportunity to talk about a walk I took some years back collecting these cards from Aldgate East to Paddington and looking for correspondences between the services offered and the neighbourhoods. Curiously, Bloomsbury seemed to have a lot of teachers offering to punish naughty boys... In any case I could then move onto applying the Stuttgart narrative to London and cast The Imperial Hotel overlooking Russel Square as a den of high class prostitution.

Another ubiquitous tour that was easy enough to apply was the Chinese Tour, this can be brought out wherever there is a Chinese restaurant. Although this approach has its limitations I rather enjoyed applying tour formulae to locations as this is in a sense the way the tourism industry operates in any case. I think there was some genuine ambiguity as to which were real and which false and this experiment certainly opens possibilities into alternative forms of presenting the guided tour research. 

Touring Public Spaces: why the growth in artist's walks?

I had an article recently published in Arts Professional on guided tours that followers of this blog will recognise as a compendium of sorts. The link to it is HERE and the issue as a whole is on the theme of outdoor arts. The full text is reproduced below.

A quiet revolution is taking place in outdoor arts. The fire-eating stilt walkers and giant robotic creatures will still be making their way through our city centres for some time to come, but they are being increasingly accompanied by another quieter form of outdoor arts: the guided tour. These are nothing new in themselves as they have been a staple of the tourism industry for a great many years. What is new is the interest that is being shown in this form by artists coming from the likes of site-specific theatre and socially engaged art who have re-imagined the form like never before. What then is this work exactly and what is driving its growing momentum?

Firstly, this sort of work can often be described as site-sensitive, that is to say it does not attempt to significantly alter or close off the public space but rather to use it in a way that makes it more public than ever. At a time when public space in the UK is being continuously undermined to the point that it is often regarded as merely the space passed through on the way to and from work or the shops, this quality of inhabiting and valuing public space as an essential site for cultural and political exchange, or quite simply, as an essential part of a cohesive society, is a defining feature.

Secondly, this sort of work does not necessarily take place in beautiful locations. I have been taken around car parks, through subways, into a McDonalds and around a flea market before, all in the name of art. This work claims spaces that are often ignored and gives them new meaning. Another feature is that this work stresses the live presence of a guide. There have been a number of well-known artistic audio tours such as Janet Cardiff’s ‘The Missing Voice’ or Graeme Miller’s ‘Linked’, but this current wave of tours play specifically with the live presence of the guide. Finally, this work is small in scale, eschewing the grand spectacle and instead connecting with people on a personal level.

Much of the impetus for this work comes from the artists themselves who often juggle the roles of writers, guides and producers. An example of this is the ‘Still Walking’ festival in Birmingham. It is a young and expanding festival that puts on an eclectic programme of guided tours that extend both the types of places a tour goes to and the sort of narrative that strings it together. At the same time it encourages experimentation with what the format of a tour can be. A novel feature of Still Walking is that it mentors local people who have never given tours before, helping them to produce their own personal form of tour. This results in unusual tours that reflect people’s personal interests and geographies, a sort of citizen’s sharing of their different takes upon the city, rather than the more conventional blue badge tour of the city’s great and good.

Another example of an artist-curated programme is that of Arttours, based in Stuttgart in Germany. As well as making their own work, the producers arrange walks and outdoor art events year round, which provide the city’s residents with a way of getting to know the city through regular creative encounters. It was through them that I first developed the project of mine ‘The Tour of All Tours’, a guided tour of guided tours that took the audience on a walking tour of the city centre. It was researched and created on location and it straddled art and tourism very directly, being both an art project that critically, and somewhat ironically, evaluated Stuttgart’s tourism industry and at the same time offered a genuine, albeit unusual, tourist experience in its own right.

The work of the Croatian company Shadow Casters is significant here too and the recent performance ‘Father Courage’ directed by Boris Bakal for Dubrovnik Summer Festival is an example of how this sort of work can be created on a larger scale and integrated with theatre. Some 14 performers, spread over five locations and using the narrow pedestrian streets and steps that connect them, gave a networked performance in which five groups of spectators were simultaneously led around and brought into a number of situations. Each of these groups was of up to 40 in number so this was a show that reached a significant public, was able to expand in moments and properly use theatrical devices yet retained an intimate feel.

When we think of outdoor arts in the UK there is a tendency to picture it as a family-friendly spectacle. I would argue that while that represents a great deal of what is on offer there is more out there and this upsurge in artist’s tours is just such an example. What’s more, if we are serious about protecting public space we should be careful that the way we use it for arts events does not in fact contribute to the problem of access. It is entirely fitting that sometimes our streets and parks are used and truly occupied by celebratory events that allow us to experience our cities in different ways, but this must be the exception and not the norm. Subtler forms of intervention that change our perception of what is there day in and day out have great value too as they can help us better appreciate the poetic qualities latent in our streets. This is coming to be recognised more widely and is, I believe, one of the reasons behind the current rise in smaller-scale artist tours and events.

My advice then is, if you have not recently taken such a tour to do so − you might be surprised at what you find. Tours are quite definitely not only for tourists.

Birmingham Tours: walks considered as theatrical structures

I should mention an old friend of mine from University Ben Waddington who has become something of a guided tour specialist in Birmingham. I've just been reading his blog which offers both a description of the walks he has created and some reflection upon them. I'm not surprised to read that he has been working with Birmingham Rep theatre in spite of his formal distance from theatre considered as a stage show.

"Thinking of myself as a theatre practitioner doesn’t come naturally but a critical aspect of developing a guided walk calls for the journalistic ability to spot a story and then tell it convincingly. I feel there are vast unexplored vistas when using the guided tour format; a lost plateau between the Blue Badge data-delivery polished standard and the its-behind-you high camp of the ghost tour. Uncharted knowledge, opportunities for new dramatic approaches, content and audiences."

I would certainly agree with this and yet I do see signs of life and of innovation in the guided tour format. I observe that artists, musicians, theatre makers and writers are experimenting with the form as never before. B Tour Festival starts this week, Walking Artists Network is awash with tours and discussion, Mythogeography likewise, my inbox seems to be almost daily graced with news of new projects putting together the arts and walking in a new manner. What I am yet to see is this experimentation finding its way into the more conventional guided tours; it seems to me that blue badge guides are not focusing upon such things as deliberate unreliability, conflicting narratives, acoustics or ambiguity, but instead are trained to know a lot of facts about a location and its history. The two camps are basically trying to do different things for different constituencies. While it seems inevitable that guides will continue to be guides and artists will continue to be artists, I do think that the current wave of interest in the format of tours could provide an opportunity for guides and artists to learn something from one another. The guides have generally been doing it for longer than the artists and have a lot to pass on while the artists can inject considerable life into a rather stale format.

B Tour (open call)

There is a new festival in Berlin devoted to alternative tours with an Open Call, details below. I will be speaking on a panel this time round. 

Open call for the first B_Tour Festival

30/08/2013 - 1/09/2013B_Tour invites groups and individuals, to create tours that rethink storytelling, and suggest innovative, experimental approaches to the conventional format of a guided tour. Tours should encompass engaging ways of intervening public spaces and relate strongly to Berlin’s social/cultural/geographical fabric. The festival is particularly oriented to projects that challenge us to rethink our everyday relationship to the urban environment. The festival is a multidisciplinary arts platform where various artistic expression/disciplines meet social activism. We look for audio tours, video tours, tours without a guide, tours led by animals! Anything goes. 

http://www.b-tour.org/

The 11AM Premiere Tour

Today the Tour of All Tours was officially launched with the first performance taking place at 11AM and a second at 4PM. I'm more accustomed to an evening schedule for first performance, but this being a city tour, I was working on a tourist's timetable. That's not to say I have never done morning performances before, I have, but it is remains a rarity.

Making this sort of performance, there is no delineated backstage and frontstage. From the moment I arrived at the tourist information I was in the zone. However, the 'zone' was not the same as that in a more formal performance. The situation here is an entirely different one. During the time spent waiting for everyone to arrive, I borrowed a trick from a tour guide I saw in Oxford: chat to people in a collective sort of way (as opposed to a private conversation) and ask them where they are from. This might sound like a dumb thing but it had some genuine use. I got a better sense of who the people taking the tour were and what their level of English was (it happened to be quite good) and it created a sense of us being a group and not just a collection of individuals who have happened to have chosen the same tour. Once we were all there we set off and the tour got moving.

I am not in the habit of declaring performances of mine a success, that sort of thing is other people's business. I'm much more interested in what happens, what thoughts it provokes and how to act upon them. From that point of view, then, I see that the tour works in different ways for people who are visitors and for people who know the city. For the visitor it actually does fulfil a touristic role of informing them about the guided tours on offer, albeit in a novel way, and for the local it introduces them to a side of the city they usually bypass. This is a good basis upon which to build. However, what it does not yet do is propose a highly fractured experience, it tends to remain within the conventional guided tour format. I'm happy enough with this as a starting point, but I will be curious to see how it can start to stretch this form and still fulfil its two basic functions, as outlined above.

Once we were done with the tour we went to a nearby cafe and had a good discussion about the tour and I should thank Thomas, Eric, Andrea and Kaspar for their generous feedback. Also a big thank you is in order for Art Tours more generally as they have been the first people to support this project and have made very useful practical and artistic contributions along the way.  

With the premiere out of the way, I found this nice fountain in the city centre filled with washing up liquid and foaming over. This is a very popular game in the shopping centre in Portsmouth where I grew up, and while some people hate it, I have to say I have always understood the attraction and have wanted to do it myself, but never quite gotten round to it.

The afternoon saw Andreas giving the tour and doing the pointing instead of me.

From the point of view of a performer, it is really helpful to be able to see someone else giving the performance when you yourself have also made it. It takes it out of your own head and into something much more concrete. I can look at how Andreas gives the tour and see many things that I can learn from. I also notice that he gives the tour in a somewhat different way than I do and I have to distinguish between what is the tour, and what is the tour guide. He does some things in his own way, and they work for him but would be foolish to copy. So there is this process taking place right now of the two tours, the English and the German, starting to find their own directions according to the different languages, cultures and  personalities of the guides.

Finally, here is the forecast for tomorrow. Terrible. Cold and wet. I will be curious who, if anyone, will come in such miserable conditions.

The Mercedes Benz Museum Tour

I have asked a few people here what the star attraction of the city is and I have received different answers on each occasion. Stuttgart Ballet was one suggestion (from a dancer) and the Mercedes Benz Museum another (from the Tourist Information). Wanting to be a proper tourist and take advantage of my naivete I chose the latter for today's main activity. I made my way there on foot, which is clearly not the concept, walked through the city park and noticed that there was a lot of construction going on near the station. They had thoughtfully provided a viewing platform from which the work could be seen. 

There are a few things worth noting. First of all the existence of this platform is curious in itself: they have turned the construction work into a display, a sort of low-level attraction in its own right. The next thing are the pictures that line the fence and form part of this display: computer generated paradises that make any of the inconveniences of the present excusable, even noble. The final thing is the tower that rises out of the train station. There is apparently an observation deck at the top of this tower, though it is closed right now for renovation and will open shortly. It strikes me that it can be very useful to have a vantage point within my tour of tours as this can allow me to talk about the places outside of the city-centre that can be observed from on high. This greatly expands my possibilities allowing me to easily talk about such attractions as the Mercedes Benz Museum, located out in a suburb of Stuttgart.

It is a large and stylishly designed museum that offers guided tours in English at 11AM Tuesdays to Saturdays. I found myself in the company of an American man and an Australian family and, together with our guide, we made our way through the exhibition rooms. She used a small microphone and portable transmitter that allowed us to hear her easily even from a distance. Not being a driver myself and not being so interested in cars I was expecting the worst but was pleasantly surprised that the curators had managed to expand upon the concept of a technical museum sufficiently to make it into something of interest to the non-geek. Our guide had to talk a lot because there was less distance between points of interest than there would be if this were an outdoor tour but she sustained it pretty well and personalised it in places making a point of showing me the Mercedes that The Queen was driven in when visiting Germany. 

The museum proposes two intersecting tours of the collection, a chronological one starting in the late 19th Century and a thematic one organised around celebrity's cars, racing cars and so on. They are able to do this as the museum's floor structure is constructed upon a double helix design. There was clearly some conceptual thinking going on here that is matched with architectural elegance and what's more, the results don't require a PhD to appreciate, it all flows quite naturally. There is of course a gift shop and restaurant, there is even a car showroom in the basement if you want to drive away in a new car. 

In summary I'd say they actually did manage to make a genuine tourist attraction out of a collection of historical vehicles. Of course it helps if you like cars in the first place but it can also work as a museum that sets out the context in which the cars were produced. These are two not contradictory ways to approach the place: as a collection of attractive cars and as a museum where you will learn something. Combining these two qualities seems appropriate to the city as I get the impression that tourism in Stuttgart tends towards being high-minded: there are many museums, cultural, historical and architectural points of interest. What I have not seen yet are any truly dumb attractions. OK I did pick up a brochure for Europa Park and that does look properly kitsch but that is a fair drive away and simply in the Baden-Württemberg region, of which Stuttgart is the capital.