The Sound Map Tour: an immersive audio tour of Brick Lane

The Sound Map Tour is an audio tour of Brick Lane and the surrounding streets. Like the Walk The Line Tour, it is also one that can be downloaded for free from the Internet, this time from the Sound Map Website. They have produced four London sound walks and these have been made on a commercial basis. Probably due to this Brick Lane walk being slightly out of date, you no longer have to pay for it. 

The tour starts opposite the Beigel Shop at the top of Brick Lane and is introduced and led by author Tarquin Hall, who stakes his local credentials by saying he once lived in a flat looking over the Beigel Bake. The tour begins with some words of warning, which basically amount to keep your eyes open and if anything goes wrong, take off the headphones and pause the recording.

Unlike the Walk The Line tour, this tour has been properly researched, a polished script written, it has been well recorded and a specially commissioned sound track added. There are even three interviews, such as one with the proprietor of the beigel shop. I couldn't say if the grey haired man standing behind the counter was or was not the man I was listening to, but the recording said he was with a man in his 70s so it is quite possible that I was hearing him speaking while simultaneously watching him at work. This uncertainty, not knowing if it was or was not him, added a pleasant ambiguity.  

The tour made its way down Brick Lane and I could not but notice Broadgate Tower in the background, itself the site of a number of tours that I've been researching, and which I will try to cover. Perhaps the most tangential of them is it being a stopping point on a Skyfalll film location tour. This most recent of Bond films had to work to a tighter budget than anticipated and the tower had to stand in for a Shanghai office block, as it was too expensive to film in China. You can see the building featuring heavily in the out takes video starting at 18 seconds. There are a number of different tours that will take you there as part of a Bond themed tour.

I was perfectly comfortable taking the tour without a map, even though there was one provided as a safety net. It was possible because the narrator had a system for getting people to the right place, holding them there while he was talking and then setting them off in the right direction to the next stop. It basically involved him saying walk to the next junction and stop at the corner. Some music would play or he'd continue his story and he'd check in to make sure you were on course. Once that story was complete, you'd go the next track and you'd get your instructions on where to walk next. The sound was, therefore, pretty much constant and this made the tour far more immersive than the other audio tours I have taken, where you are switching between recordings and map. This was much more like being inside a movie, in no small part also due to the sound design which added music and footsteps to the recording. There was just enough time to make it from one point to the next, though it might be a struggle to do this on a market day as you'd have to fight your way through the crowds. The one thing I had to keep fiddling with was the volume; sometimes there would be traffic backed up and I needed it loud to cut through the car engines, other times the street fell quiet and the soundtrack felt abrasive.

The tour took me to The Vibe Bar and the narrator talked about the changing occupants and usage of Truman's Brewery. The general idea was that change was a feature of the area and nothing new in itself. Every now and again, when something bad happened, the narrator would introduce it with, "Sadly, ...." which became a bit of a running theme not only about changes for the worse but also unfortunate historical events such as a racist nail bomb attack. 

I arrived at one of the more fashionable shopping and eating areas and sailed straight through.  

Continuing on the blue plaque theme from previous tours, I spotted a further two on this tour. One is that of Anna Maria Garthwaite, who got a bona fide English Heritage plaque, and the other is Gizmo (a dog) who gets his own more homemade plaque outside the Golden Heart. I noticed that there is a website that attempts to record all the plaques and monuments in London. This would be the perfect resource for constructing a plaque tour. Standing outside the pub, the narrator  told me about the celebrity regulars, interviewed the landlady and encouraged me to pop in for a pint. I was however in a bit of a hurry so didn't take up the offer.

I passed the Ten Bells and got a short history of the pub's connection to Jack the Ripper and heard  how the pub was for over 10 years named The Jack The Ripper as you can see on the right. Not a pub popular with the ladies, I suspect, back then. He talked about how the Ripper tours have been a local attraction and source of revenue for some years.

The tour took me into Taj Stores, a sizeable Bangladeshi supermarket, where the story of the Bangladeshi community began. Listening to an audio-tour out in the street is one thing but inside a store it becomes more curious as you are being told information about the people whose space you are standing in and who are right in front of you. What's more, they don't know that you are listening to someone telling you about them; you could be listening to Lady Gaga for all they know. This information gap can made me feel ever so slightly self-conscious, as if I were spying on them. 

The immigration theme continued down the road with the traces of the Jewish immigrants being highlighted. The remaining traces were relatively few in number. To compensate for that, klezmer music played while the history of Jews in the area was recounted. This music returned at least once again later in the tour and became a theme to announce "jewish section of the narrative" in the same way that there was an Indian sounding theme that returned when you were in the general bounce-down-Brick-Lane-moments of the tour. In this respect the music was there to always support the narrative, both thematically and rhythmically. This was an carefully composed audio tour and not a work of audio art that made you ask questions about the status of the different elements.

Somewhat inevitably, the tour again took in the mosque. The story was again that of tolerance and change in the area. I heard, once again, how the building had been transformed from a Christian to a Jewish to a Muslim place of worship. Having heard this a few too many times due to the professional distortion of being a reviewer of local tours, I was more interested in the Renault.

While the narrator talks and you make your way from one point to another, you do of course see things which are not directly part of the script. In fact the majority of the things I saw were not mentioned as he was busy telling a story not listing the objects I could see when walking down the road. Come to think of it, that might make for a rather unusual sort of tour: no story just a recitation of what is there... or was to be seen, when the recording was made. This is much in the mode of George Perec's Species of Spaces where, for example, he suggests, "force yourself to see more flatly" (page 51). I'm not quite sure how I'd describe these artery thickening sweets, but I certainly saw many trays of them as I made my way down Brick Lane. 

Cafe Naz was another point of interest. I stopped and listened to an interview with the owner about his thriving restaurant whilst looking at the building site which is what remains of Cafe Naz. With a walking tour this dislocation does not happen as the guide can change his story to suit reality but with an audio tour, whose narrative is fixed in time, this must be quite common. The narrator talked about the process of change and so this was, to an extent not as jarring as it might otherwise be. It does strike me, however, that this must be a major drawback for most audio tours: their limited life span.  

I then came to the end of Brick Lane and heard about the main local bank that is used to transfer money back to Bangladesh, particularly to the Syhlet region, where the majority of the Bangladeshis who have settled in the area were said to have first come from. I also heard how this has created not just a pocket of Syhlet in London but also a reciprocal pocket of London in Syhlet as people have taken back things they have learned to like here, such as marmite. 

The tour concluded on Whitechapel High Street, close to Aldgate East tube. My overall impression was rather positive: it was intelligent and skilfully put together. This form of immersive audio tour has the effect of taking you properly into the tour, but this in turn can have the effect of removing you somewhat from the place. It was not so long a tour, about an hour in length, so it did not feel like an imposition but rather it gave a condensed impression of the Brick Lane and its life, both past and present. The contrast between this and The Walk The Line Tour is great and goes to show what can be done with a bit of effort. 

The Walk The Line Tour

The Walk The Line Tour is a free audio tour that you can download from London Transport Museum's website. It comes as five separate walks and the one I took is the Shoreditch to Whitechapel walk. The Overground is the name of the line, or more precisely network, that this walk nominally follows and this network is a consolidation of a string of separate tube and rail services that were notoriously unpredictable. I remember one part of it being called the North London Line back in the 90s when it was a joker service that came and went pretty much when it felt like it. It changed hands and became known as The Silverlink Metro for a while, and under new management was only modestly better. There was something about the line that seemed intrinsically slack. This section of the overground, around Shoreditch, a section previously known as the East London Line, was always slightly different from the other tube lines; taking it was like entering into a parallel tube service. When I studied in New Cross I took it often and I remember the train announcements were sometime so informal that it was like being on a mini-bus with friends with the driver chatting and saying hello to everyone as they got on and off. It was smartened up for the Olympics and there is no chat now. There is, however, a community engagement policy and that is how, I suppose, this audio took came about. 

Shoreditch High Street Station is where the walk begins. The tour guide is a woman from the Boundary Estate Womens' Group and she tells you about the new station and she seems to be very happy with it saying they have regenerated the neighbourhood. She even expresses her hope that Starbucks can move in.

This is the map that comes with the walk and which you can either download onto your phone or print out and follow off the page. With the title 'Walk The Line' you might imagine that the newly spruced up line might feature as the defining element of the walk, but not a bit of it. As you can see, the walk first visits the The Boundary Estate then heads South down Brick Lane, goes by way of Spitalfields Market and Petticoat Lane Market, before heading along Whitechapel Road to its end point Whitechapel Station. The train line follows a very different route and heads first East above Allen Gardens crosses Valance Road then heads South into Whitechapel. This walk does not follow the line at all, but rather, uses the two stations as its bookends.

Following the map's suggested route I saw a long line of people queuing to get into this building. I tried to guess the purpose of the queue asking myself which celebrity was inside or what sort of audition was taking place but could not tell, so I asked one of the people. It was a discount designer clothing sale, which came as an anticlimax.

Round the corner I passed the local coffee shop, Allpress, which seemed to be doing a steady trade. I can't exactly see why Starbucks would be an improvement upon it, but then again, I'm not so into global tax-dodging brands in general.

I arrived at the first stop on the tour, the Boundary Estate, and I can only guess the tour took me there because the commission for it had fallen on the Boundary Women's Group. This is a way to say the estate was not on the route at all, quite the opposite, and there was conspicuously little to see here. The guide gave a very personal impression of what the area was like from the point of view of a local resident. She neither went deeply into the history of the place, just a few dates was enough, nor into her relationship to the place. In this respect local residents often know very little 'visitor information' about their neighbourhood and their knowledge is often more practical along the lines of where to go to top up your Oyster card without having to wait in a queue. On the other hand, while we all have relationships to the places we live in, transforming these into a tour requires a very specific set of skills that are not always sufficiently appreciated. I don't know the exact process by which this tour was put together, but something was clearly lacking and It may well be as much the fault of London Transport Museum for commissioning this group and not supplying adequate support to help them turn their stories and impressions into a half-decent tour. It could also be a case of me expecting more from a community project than either the community involved in making it or London Transport Museum, who commissioned it, ever did.

Leaving the estate and following the route I next passed Richmix on Bethnal Green Road. This is going to become a central spot on my tour of the area as this is going to be the starting point of The Tour of All Tours which will be presented by Richmix next Summer. Something I noticed that never struck me before, is that they have their own blue plaque beside the door. The Heritage Lottery funding plaque has copied the basic design of the English Heritage blue plaque and then squashed it a little so that it becomes oval shaped. This must constitute the second unofficial blue plaque spotted on these Shoreditch tours so far. More will no doubt reveal themselves. A final thing to mention is that I will be doing something in this venue before next Summer: on 31st January, Chinese New Year's Day, I'll be giving a performance of The Customer Is Always Wrong, in the studio upstairs.  

Making my way down Brick Lane I saw two artists at work on a side street. My interest in their work had been awakened from taking a street art tour, so I decided to take a closer look.

On that tour I was told that a significant aspect of street art is the legality of the work. Having heard how a street artist was sentenced to 2 years for defacing a train recently and how 5 years had even been handed out by a Sheffield court, I figured the two young women would not be taking their time to spray so openly if they faced similar treatment. That's why I was interested to take their picture and that's how I got talking to Lee Bofkin who was watching them approvingly. Lee, it turns out, has been instrumental in getting the site owners' approval for a great quantity of the street art in the area to be made legally, and for then promoting the artists' work. Lee said he was not, however, involved in street art tours at all.

A curious omission on the Walk The Line Tour was the old Shoreditch Station, just off Brick Lane. This nondescript brick building that sports some less consensual street art was the end stop on the East London Line. It represents the bad side of the neighbourhood and so was, I am guessing, not included in the Walk The Line Tour, a tour that had practically zero interest in the railway line. The park behind me in this photo is one that I remember hearing a funny, though wholly unverified, story about. The artists Gilbert and George, who live just around the corner, were walking through this park dressed in their identical suits when a gang of skinheads spotted them and shouted, "Oy! Get um!" The two conceptual artists knew the neighbourhood well enough to know this was no idle threat and had to sprint, high-speed, out of the park and back onto Brick Lane to avoid a good kicking. The scene somehow reminds me of the closing sequence of The Benny Hill Show, though through a more violent East London lens.

The walk took me past the many vintage markets and food stalls that thrive in the area and which contribute to the current Camden Town-ification of Brick Lane.

The audio tour stopped somewhat short of the Mosque and talked about it having been a church and synagogue in the past, a line that is repeated in virtually every other tour, no matter what the subject of the tour may be. Even street art tours, like the one I stumbled across here, go over this history.

Next stop was Spitalfields Market. In the Spitalfields Stories Tour I mentioned how it had changed and become more corporate. This was an observation echoed in this tour, however, it was also one welcomed and it was described as a trendy place and one of the best markets in London. What was strange is that the guide went onto say that the things on sale were also very expensive no longer affordable to local residents. It was as if she was celebrating being priced out of her own local market. That's when I started to suspect that she perhaps had an idea of who I the listener was and that she was showing me the most up-market version of the local area that she could, in the belief that that is what I wanted to see. Today the market was hosting a vinyl day for independent record labels. There were a great many stalls selling records and quite a crowd of people milling about.  

Then I noticed Doug from The Alternative Tour bouncing up and down to keep warm beside the goat statue, the COSTA charnel house in the background. What's more Doug had a friend who, with beard, leather jacket and cap, also looked the part to give their tour. Later in my tour I did in fact notice Doug's colleague giving their street art tour. 

I then made my way to the next point, Petticoat Lane, where I noticed they have put up street maps that are oriented so that the top side of the map points in front of you as you stand facing the map and the bottom of the map indicates what is behind you. I have to say I dislike this sort of map and much prefer those that have North at the top and South at the bottom. I'm guessing that these sort of maps are more easily read by people who have never learnt to read conventional maps as there must be some reason why they are springing up right now; I saw then in Glasgow city centre recently too.

There was a short description of Petticoat Lane Market, again from the point of view of a local shopper, but what was more captivating was the film that being made on the street. It looked like a low-budget film as there was not the usual paraphernalia of the film set, but the director and cameraman were planning their shot carefully and rehearsing the movement of the steady-cam.  

Then the street came alive with a bike gang. At first I wondered if this was a flashback to the Critical Mass Tour from a few nights before but no these cyclists were in fact the extras for the scene: a gang of 8 young men on BMXs. They cycled at speed towards the council estate and then charged up the stairs. I was then taken back to the idea of the image of the city being fashioned more through movies than reality and was reminded that the image of the city is not consistent, people in the area sometimes have access to professional quality equipment and also participate in the generation of images too. The identity of the city is multiple and contested, not the sole property of Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes.

The walk then took me on a long stretch with no audio along Whitechapel Road. There are two tours that this dreary trudge brings to mind. First of all, the blue paint on the road indicates CS2 the 'cycle superhighway' upon which four cyclists have been killed so far, with more deaths seemingly inevitable. One indeed was killed at the junction in the background. I wouldn't advise anyone to take a bike tour of CS2 unless they were a TFL executive. This story of the failed transport strategy was very much the subtext of The Critical Mass tour I recently took. The second tour that I had to think of was the Whitechapel Gallery First Thursday's Tour. This is a free bus tour which you apply to by lottery and which takes you to a number of gallery openings in East London on the first Thursday of the month in the company of a curator. I added my name to the lottery and am pleased to say have just been offered a place on the tour this week. Review to follow soon.

And so I finally came to the Starbucks that has been denied Shoreditch. I did not dally.

A little further along Whitechapel Road I saw a Tesco supermarket set back from the main road. This brought to mind something I heard about a coach tour recently. It was a coach tour to Stonehenge and Bath and one of the passengers was a girl who particularly liked shopping at Tesco because, she said, they have good meat and dairy. Apparently, for the whole tour, she kept on commenting, "Oh look a Tesco" when the coach passed one. Not information that the tour guide included in his commentary, but something that the other people taking the tour got anyway.

There was a brief stop by the East London Mosque and a few comments about the Citroen Garage on the side which apparently was the site of a no longer used station. The guide said she herself did not know about this lost station until recently either and this gave me the impression that she had done a little bit of local history research prior to recording to tour so that she had enough to say.

Final stop was Whitechapel Station which she described as a place, "we all know and use." This again thew me as to who this "we" was. Was this a tour by and for local residents, or for whom exactly? I couldn't exactly say. Anyway, Whitechapel station and market was its usual unruly self and this brought to mind the Olympic Marathon route change that I mentioned on a previous blog. Despite official assertions that the reason the race would bypass East London was not because the area is poor and would give a negative impression of London to the global audience, it is hard to see the snub in any other way. The marathon is, after all, a tour of the city that presents it in a very specific way through the interaction of sport and architecture. 

Thankfully POPLAR TV was at hand to cover the 2012 race in the satirical McMarathon report.

The Critical Mass Tour

Always on the lookout for new tour experiences, I got on my bike and joined the Critical Mass Tour yesterday. It is easy to know when and where to find it: 7PM on the last Friday of the Month from under Waterloo Bridge. It has been like that for as long as I have known and I was on a Critical Mass ride quite some years ago, maybe as far back as 10 years ago. It was therefore an overdue and exciting proposition, as it offered a wildly different sort of tour to those so far covered on the blog.

I made my way to Waterloo Bridge and found quite a crowd already assembled. Many hundred cyclists gathered on all sorts of bikes, including quite a number on the so-called 'Boris Bikes': the rental bikes named after the populist conservative Mayor of London, administered by the city and sponsored by a bank that does not need promoting. It was surprising to see so many as I thought Critical Mass was for hardened cyclists only. Also, since this ride was of an indefinite duration, I thought it would be unattractive to those renting bikes by the hour. Happily, I was wrong. The protocol is you arrive anytime after 6PM to be ready to start cycling at 7PM. While cyclists gathered there was a lot of chat and some, mostly, restrained drinking: I saw a guy next to me swigging from a bottle of Captain Morgan but most contented themselves with a single beer.  

At 7PM there was a swelling of noise: horns, bells, cries and inarticulate bloke-ish guttural sounds. It was the sign; we were off! We slowly emptied the Southbank and cycled past The National Theatre on our way up to the main road. This site is for me a curious one that I can't help but read more into than was probably intended. Maybe that's simply because I was previously much more involved in these spaces through the arts than I was through tours and so I come to them with an eye that still sees them as stages. I did in fact make a short POPLAR TV video outside the National Theatre last year: National Theatre To Screen Sport.

We set off and headed North over Waterloo Bridge. This is Somerset House on the right. It was not so easy to take pictures and ride at the same time but I tried my best to juggle the two. Crossing the bridge took us into the heart of London and I had to ask myself if this  happens every Critical Mass time or whether the group sometimes heads off on a very different tact. 

We descended into a road tunnel that is usually reserved for motor vehicles. There was much excited yelling as the bikes accelerated down into the tunnel, deep into the car zone. The relationship with motor vehicles is particularly bad at the moment owing to a spate of fatal accidents in the last month. Earlier in the day there had been a mass "die in" outside Transport for London's offices in protest at their transport policy and inertia at implementing agreed to improvements to the cycling infrastructure. All of this was still very much in the air as we made our way through the city.

Once we got going and settled into a rhythm I started looking a bit more at how the ride functioned. One quality that makes it deliciously slippery is the fact that there is no designated leader or organiser. There is a webpage, which is no longer updated, and this, I can imagine, might be so that nobody may be held responsible for the Critical Mass. That said, I did notice that there were people at the front of the group who did have opinions and were were not afraid to express them. For example, we were at this point approaching Oxford Street and I heard three cyclists say between them that we should avoid that road as it would mean battling buses. They then disappeared at speed towards the front to try and have their sway and lo and behold we avoided Oxford Street. Another quality is that some people dressed up. This man is wearing an animal costume. The tricky thing with it must be the tail, I hope he managed to avoid getting his tail caught up in the spokes of his back wheel. 

Predictably enough the people who hate Critical Mass the most are the taxi drivers. This chap in particular was a nasty piece of work who drove into a stationary cyclist who was standing in front of him in order to try and clear her from the road. No excuse. Lizard brain.

This then sparked off a heated exchange with a passerby who seemed to have a lot of opinions and thought of himself as a peacemaker. To be honest I thought of him as a twit in a shiny grey suit who was covering the driver. Instinct was to take my lock and smash the drivers windscreen so he could have a taste of his own medicine but of course I was far too polite and just took pictures.

Not everyone was in such bad humour however. There was actually quite a varied response to the ride from the people in cars and those standing by the sides of the street. Some smiled and waved, others stared disapprovingly but everyone noticed: you could hardly not see 700 bikes stream past. The cyclist standing here is blocking the car from going into the mass of bikes and this was a common activity. At junctions bikes block the way so cars can't force their way into the pack and it was this job of enforcing the blockade which was the one that the more experienced 'Massers' took on more readily and which also put them potentially into conflict situations like that with the white taxi.

I saw a few people drinking beer as they cycled but most kept their hands on the handlebars or reaching to their phones to take pictures. There was however a bit of a Friday night atmosphere about the ride all the same and quite a number thought things through enough to take a supply with them. This was not just a demonstration or a ride, it was also a party.

That was underscored by the music. This bike was trailing a sound system and it was just one of 4 or 5 that were playing different sorts of music, everything from dance music to opera. The opera in particular was unexpected and not the typical soundtrack for a demonstration.

We headed West along Piccadilly and then down into another road tunnel. There was a bit of a thing with the tunnels, enjoying the forbidden fruit. 

And then after passing near Victoria we came to Buckingham Palace and the bikes gathered around this famous monument whose name I have never bothered to learn. Many of the riders sat back and opened up those cans of beer they'd been saving, others made circles around it, this man with two skateboarders in tow. There were quite a number of young skateboarders who mostly raced around the front of the pack. I remember last time I went on a Critical Mass it also stopped at this same spot and this gets me asking, what is the geographic palette it works with? I can't imagine a mass of bikes making its way to Crystal Palace in South London, that would be too far to get home for anyone living in the North and so my guess is there must be some unwritten rules. I did in fact cycle at the front to find out how the direction was chosen and I heard people shouting "LEFT!" from time to time so I guess it is mostly self-regulating. 

I left them to it as it looked to me as if the evening was settling into a bit of a party in front of the palace.  I was wrong on that front, that's for sure. The video below was posted on youtube which more or less shows what happened after I left: the night had quite a bit more cycling still to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7skLQ4QyXaA

My current Tour of All Tours research is centred on Shoreditch and today's tour did not go there, the nearest it got was Tower Bridge, which you can see in the video. Critical Mass could visit Shoreditch however so there is no reason why I cannot mention it as a tour that sometimes passes that way, even if it is an infrequent and irregular occurrence. It will be back East I go tomorrow however as there are still quite a number of tours still to cover in the area.