The Imposter's Tour

This is a rather unusual tour, even by the standards of this blog. It is a tour of Broadgate Tower which in itself is nothing particularly special other than that there are no public tours of the tower offered right now. What qualifies it as unique is that I had to assume a completely different identity to my own in order to take this tour. 

I arranged a tour of office spaces in order to get a better picture of a private corporate tour, since most of the tours so far covered here have been public one way or another. As the gentrifying march of the City of London, north into Shoreditch, and east into Spitalfields, is one of the key themes to have emerged as a subtext to the many tours I've taken locally, I felt it necessary to get at this story from the inside, as it were, rather than only hearing it from the perspective of the soon to be displaced. I was told I'd find the entrance opposite the giant reindeer, and so it was while in the background is the mouth of Liverpool Street Station, a short walk away.

I arranged an appointment with a company that specialises in renting office space in Broadgate Tower to smaller businesses. I made up a cover story that was inspired by a scene from the James Bond film Skyfall, that was filmed in the building, a scene in which the tower was made over to look like a swanky office block in Shanghai. My cover story was that I was representing a Chinese film producer, a Mr Gao, whose movie was going to be filmed in London next December. This film, Snow Warrior, would require an office for its team to do pre-production work starting in October and they would require more space still, once the full production team arrived for the shoot. Many of the shots were to take place in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, hence the logic of siting their production office here in Broadgate Tower rather than in Soho next to Chinatown, which would seem a more natural choice. With my story prepared I turned up at reception in the company of a friend Elo, who was cast as the photographer. To dress the part I had to wear a suit and tie. The suit was no problem but I was surprised to find that the only tie I had to hand was a bit of a joke tie I acquired recently, a tie decorated with the flags of the European member states. In order to justify the Eurocrat tie, I came up with the story of having to go to a meeting at Europe House immediately after this tour.    

  

The reception desk downstairs asked our business, took our names and issued entry passes. We ascended an escalator into the future then used the passes to open a polished steel security gate and gain access to the lifts. These lifts were unlike any I have previously used for when I saw one open I jumped inside and looked for the button to stop at the twelfth floor in vain. A woman already standing inside politely evicted me, pointing back outside where I found a glass panel in the wall which, when pressed, asked me to select a floor. Pressing twelve, it paused a moment, then indicated I should go to lift C which opened, we stepped inside and were whisked skyward.

After a false start at the wrong reception we found the right one, were greeted with a smile and asked to sit. Refreshments were offered and our contact was called. After a short pause she came around the corner and introduced herself. She took us to an office where we sat and began the tour. This started with questions about what I was looking for and I launched into the Mr Gao story. It seemed to go pretty well and I was relieved I had prepared my story sufficiently in advance so that I could just roll it out with a smile.

The tour of the offices then began. We were shown into some empty offices and also into working offices like this one. There was an absence of clutter, as much of the equipment like photocopiers, binders and water coolers, is shared and located outside. 

One after another, I entered the spaces and talked about Mr Gao's requirements. It became easier to maintain this story once it had got a bit of momentum up; it was almost as if I were starting to believe it myself. Given the context, I had to think of The Yes Men and their infiltration of the corporate sector to make activist art. While I am well accustomed to switching between different fronts in daily life, this level of pretence is something else and required some acting skills, quick thinking and complete investment in the mask coupled with a relaxation into the role, inhabiting it as myself and bringing personal qualities like humour and inquisitiveness to it. While it is completely unforgivable and I in no way condone it, I do start to see how it was possible for British police infiltrators to settle into their roles of  environmental activists to the point that they formed sexual relationships with the people they were spying on and even fathered children with them. It was Plato who said "the mask which the actor wears is apt to become his face." There is something mildly intoxicating about maintaining a front and the thrill this can provide could, I imagine, blind one to the ethical dimensions of it.

This is the view out a window facing North and East out over Hackney. Running across the centre of the picture is the Overground line with Shoreditch High Street Station the concrete lump in the middle. My tour of tours next year will be covering part of this territory and surveyed from up here it mostly looks like low-level run-down buildings, railway yards and waste grounds begging for redevelopment. The City might imagine itself doing the area a favour by recasting Shoreditch in is own image; where there was once deprivation let there now be tall, shiny offices with a Pret a Manger on the ground floor! A curious marketing hook that was cast my way by my guide was that this was a creative space somehow distinct from the number crunchers down the road in the heart of The City. The basic idea is that the frisson of Shoreditch rubbing against The City produces a different sort of business environment. Evidence used in support of this was that there were recruiters renting offices here. They qualified as creative in this world.

This is the view opposite and to the south. It didn't strike me at the time but it does now that if you had a good vantage point and a very powerful lens you could probably read what was on the desks of these people. Reason enough to draw the blinds. 

This is one of the meeting rooms I was shown around. I seem to remember this room was called Battersea, another was named Camden. They all bore the names of respectable London neighbourhoods giving the offices a connection to the wider city they were located in. There were no Leytonstones or Newhams however, this was a city of desirable neighbourhoods only. These rooms came with video conferencing facilities and tea and coffee were provided as part of the package too. They were really quite desirable for what they were. I learned that some of them were leased not only by the hour for meeting but more long-term. There was an independent business school that used two of the larger ones as classrooms into which were packed, predictably enough, a largely Chinese student body learning the finer points of global investment.

We returned to the office and talked over the terms and prices. Unfortunately the computer presentation didn't want to open so I missed out on that but I received it in a file to go over at my leisure. It is not at all what I require but I can imagine the package would be of interest to businesses looking for a foothold in The City. I was struck by the fact that Broadgate Tower advertised itself as a filming location and made it easy for people to film inside of it. Skyfall was not an isolated event but part of consistent stream of media productions that use the building to portray such things as intrigue, Shanghai, chic dining, insider trading and the future.

And here is Elo who got roped into the story as the photographer. This was a good role for her to play as it was close enough to her real life presence that it could be played quite naturally. What's more, it meant that I had my hands free and could concentrate on playing my role with the documentation being both taken care of and explained as part of our story: Mr Gao would want to see pictures of the space. Thank you Elo.

Our tour of Broadgate Tower concluded with us returning our security passes. Here I had to take this picture myself with my phone as taking a picture of the security infrastructure with a camera would draw attention to us for sure. The phone however is a godsend as I could appear to be looking at messages, perhaps finding the address of my next meeting... at Europe House in Westminster.

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.