What is the waylosing tour?

The idea of leading a waylosing walk may sound a little perverse but it's not just a joke for it comes from the solid principle that if you never go out of your way you never discover new places. I'm aware the terms ‘losing your way’ or ‘being lost’ have negative connotations, they sound like a problem, like a lack of something, but these states almost never exist in an absolute form, we almost always have some idea of where we are: which country, city and neighbourhood we're in. Even Christopher Columbus landing on and ‘discovering’ the the Americas, which he mistook for Japan and China, was not completely lost. He knew he was five weeks sail west of Europe.

I’m not planning anything quite so ambitious as that for the voyage on the 2^nd August in Birmingham with Still Walking. More modestly, I’d like to share some techniques and ideas which I use to put myself off my habitual tracks. This walk will, therefore, not follow a predefined route that pushes us ever further into obscurity, the route will instead be decided in the moment depending on who is taking the walk, which areas we are unfamiliar with and what we find. In this way it will be about the process of waylosing, the decisions we have to make and how we can make sense of the journey. Since most of us on the walk will know the city to a greater or lesser extent, chances are we will not be well and truly lost, but we might well come across a few unfamiliar streets, talk about what we find, what it means to not know where you are and not know where you are going. 

I'm excited that this walk has been paired with a wayfinding walk as I see the two of them as dealing with very similar issues. I did some waylosing experiments in Beijing recently, as it is easier to get lost in a foreign country, and I found I had to think a lot about how we navigate and find our way. It was necessary, for example, to choose the right area to get lost in, to locate landmarks in order to lose them and to keep a detailed mental map in order to know when it had been irreparably mangled. Like the unruly younger sibling then, this waylosing walk is cut from a similar cloth but attempts to know the rules only in order to break them.

Finally, on a practical note, the walk is going to take some time and we will try to include a stop for light refreshment on the way, though obviously that depends on where we end up. There will be quite a bit of walking involved, so dress appropriately, and the plan is to find our way back into Birmingham City Centre by 6PM at the latest. You can bring phones but using their map function is absolutely forbidden!  

Tours On Demand

The Beijing Tour of All Tours is now being given as a performance on demand, that's to say it is available for private groups in much the same way as guided tours of the Chinese capital are. If you are interested contact me via the website www.billaitchison.co.uk. The tour on demand will be available until July so if you are interested get in touch sooner rather than later.

There is also a rather well written article on the performance and its research in the current Time Out Beijing. It is reproduced in full below.  

The Tour of Tours Shoreditch Tryout

Last weekend I made an experiment to test out the material I have been gathering on Shoreditch and The City. It was a way of bringing some focus to the research I have been doing and offered me a chance to get feedback upon it before the next stage of making it into a more distinct work in its own right.

It is difficult to write about my own tour and make anything like the same sort of critical remarks as I make when reviewing other people's. I will instead just restrict myself to one or two comments. Firstly, I decided to borrow the hat idea from the Occupy Tour team. With me being tall already, wearing a top hat adds and extra bit again onto my height and means I don't need any umbrella to lead people, I am perfectly visible with the hat alone. More than that, it also has echos of Phileas Fogg the Victorian gentleman explorer/navigator of Jules Verne. I find this both amusing and sympathetic as I have just an element of these characteristics myself. The hat therefore gives me license to play up these qualities when so required.

It was a small group that I led, maybe 8 in number. This was a very manageable size and I didn't have to shout or play to the crowd at all. I suspect that to make the tour economically viable I will have to lead larger groups but if I had a choice I'd stick to this smaller number as it made everything more conversational. People felt easy to ask me questions and share their own observations in front of one another, something that larger more anonymous groups generally suppress. 

For the pictures I must thank Debbie Kent. She, like some of the others in the group, is also working in a related way on performances that deal with the city. My group was in fact a great mix of artists, curators and friends who managed to entertain one another very effectively as they made their way from point to point. 

The tour was quite simple and transparent in the sense that I did not try anything too smart formally but rather performed it as a report on the tours I had taken so far. Giving it in this way left me enough space to be able to perform it in an engaging tone. I should be careful not to lose some of this informality when I next begin the work of integrating the research and layering this tour in a more deliberate way. The comments afterwards in the pub were positive and constructive and I look forward to the Summer when I will complete this tour, start giving it to a broader public and ditch the padded coat. 

End Of The Year Tour: a party pub crawl gone wrong

Thanks to everyone for your support and encouragement this year. I have met many wonderful people along the way, have been on some unusual and thought provoking tours and have been able to produce a number of artistic tour events of my own. And this is just the start! 2014 will see some of this work and writing going to some new places on the other side of the, or should I say my, world. 2014 will also see some new types of tours too, so plenty of challenges and, I have to hope, innovation. The Tour of All Tours is on the move! 

I was meant to round off the year with a Christmas Party Pub Crawl Tour but this did not quite happen as expected. I'll tell the story when I come round to taking it again but this time round it would have basically have turned into going clubbing with some hard drinking Aussie and Kiwi girls. Whilst it would have been a new one on me, I figured that was not the tour I wanted to end the year on so I'll be looking for an alternative tour to close things. In this sense I sometimes like to use a tour as a vehicle that helps me see things in a new perspective. We'll see what sort of tour, if any, that tour will be.