The BBC's REAL Shanghai Tour: the dwindling currency of authenticity

The REAL Shanghai is an audio-tour that can be downloaded for free from the BBC. When I was in Taipei recently, I had an interesting conversation about the theme of authenticity and the tourist's experience. I was thinking back to those words as I walked from the metro station to the start point of the audio tour and passed all manner of 'REAL' sites such as these improvised panel walls. I was wondering if the idea of the real city, that the BBC were about to present to me, was going to be any more real than what I was already looking at. 

After an upbeat jazz intro, the tour began uncertainly. According to the map, the cream coloured building on the right was the start point. I listened to the narrator talk about the history and architecture of Broadway Mansions and he said it was an impressive art deco building with commanding view. Yes... a view of a minor road bridge. While it is OK, I couldn't see why he thought it was so very special.   

It turned out that it was marked incorrectly on the map, really quite far off at that. Not only was number 1 quite some distance off, as a result of mistaking waterways, but numbers 4 and 6 were also a little imprecise. It is surprising that this managed to happen and never got corrected. BBC what is going on?

All this would not have been such an issue if it were not for the fact I was walking at a snail's pace. I had woken up in the morning with an intense pain at the top of my right leg. It was as if I had been attacked in my dream and had badly pulled a muscle defending myself. I tried to soldier through the pain but increasingly wondered whether I should I seek medical attention, massage, acupuncture, or something altogether more esoteric. I was getting slower and slower: just lifting this dead lump of a leg and placing it in front of me became a great effort and climbing up or down steps was positively painful. 

I was struck by how inappropriate this dolphin topiary was seeing as how The Yangtze River, which Shanghai sits at the delta of, was until ten years ago the unique habitat of a now extinct species of dolphin. These leafy creatures jumping out of the bushes are not some sort of memorial to the Baiji, these are stereotypical cute dolphins. Memorials tend to be created to benefit someone or something in the present and driving the Baiji to extinction is probably something that there is more desire to forget than remember. By a complete coincidence, when I got home and looked at this picture, I realised that standing in the background is the missing wayward point 1 of the tour, the REAL Broadway Mansions! Completing a tour is, in a way, a similar pleasure to finishing a jigsaw so I was happy to see I had in fact, inadvertently, covered the 9 points of this tour.

Moving onto The Bund, I then ducked into this park, the site of the former British Consulate.  Stepping into this park I got the same immediate sense of discomfort I get when I am in  places like Whitehall. The British ruling class and their bureaucratic representatives have generally felt more like adversaries than friends to me. I took a picture, turned around and immediately walked away. I wanted nothing to do with them, not even with their memory.

Hobbling down the road as quickly as I could, I spotted this interesting poster. The meaning of it, if I understand correctly, is that you should only trust officially registered guides working for reputable companies and should avoid the unregistered people who offer you tours on the spot. Having been on a number of rather typical Chinese tours given by registered guides, I have the feeling the official ones are not necessarily any better than the private ones. They almost inevitably drag you into 'consumption traps' as part of the tour.

Next stop was the promenade with a view of the iconic architecture. Maybe this is the REAL Shanghai in the sense that it is the image of the city that has come to represent it. The problem with it, however, is that these towers are unrepresentative. There are still a majority of poorer and middling neighbourhoods. This is very much the image the city wants to project rather than what the city generally is. Another thing worth mentioning is that this sort of picture is usually 'fixed' today using photoshop to adjust the keystone, as it has been below. While the first is what the camera actually saw, the second is probably closer to how we picture it. The more closely I search for reality, the more I start to realise it can be constituted in very different ways. 

Next came a proper dark tourism site, the scene of the New Year's Eve 2014 stampede in which 36 people died. As far as I could see there was no memorial left behind. These deaths were, like the Baiji, embarrassing to those who control the space and thus not selected for remembering. There is indeed little official embrace of dark tourism in China, the only real exception being the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. The country has a disturbing history of stampedes including the world's most deadly ever (Chongqing 1941) and a string of recent ones too. It is no surprise that city officials are sensitive about this issue and from what I could see, crowd control has been stepped up and has become a far greater concern. Of course, none of this was on the BBC audio track which simply told us how the building in the background was a masterpiece which Charlie Chaplin once stayed in.

Moving down The Bund the narration settled into describing the banks that line this former colonial drag. The narrator was rather lazy in how he arranged it; he only had two or three sentences to say about each building so he strung these together and told me to look out for these various banks as I made my way to next point.

This tour was essentially one of the Western-styled architecture that can be found on The Bund, which struck me as a rather self-congratulatory sort of tour for the BBC to offer. One way in which authenticity can be understood is that something is original and not a copy of something else. Viewed in those terms, these buildings can be seen as being about as fake as Shanghai Disneyland, which recently opened to feed kitsch to a new generation of China's youth. It is possible that The Bund gains some aura of authenticity with age, namely, the period these buildings were put up in was a unique time in the city's life. But, what I think he was really cracking away at was an idea of this being REAL because it falls into a narrative of Shanghai being a city that always looks to the future. If that is the case then the older neighbourhoods don't have much hope of making it to 2050 and the city is nothing but an oversized sponge for whatever is trendy. I think there is more going on here than just that. The BBC has a big reputation but a tour is only as good as the guide who designs it and this one was so flimsy that one cough would blow it away. Reality is a fragile thing indeed.

The And While London Burns I Shivered Tour

Last week I attended a talk by Graeme Miller who was speaking about Linked, his audio walk in East London, and much thought was given to how the work had aged and how it might best be preserved, or indeed whether it ought to be allowed to quietly grow obsolete. I will cover Linked another time, but that discussion made me aware there that there was another audio tour, And While London Burns, which had also been around for a while gathering dust and which I had not got round to taking yet. So, one grimly cold afternoon in early February, I downloaded it onto my phone and, following the instructions, looked for a Starbucks next to Bank tube station.

I quickly realised that the Starbucks I was looking for had moved on to pastures greener and more lucrative in city workers in search of over-priced coffee and wifi, and the gloomy underground mini-mall I found myself in had now been colonising by a Weatherspoons pub and a decidedly mediocre looking noodle bar. The ironically named Green Man is most probably a reference to a historical pub that stood on this blighted spot 500 years ago and leant its name to this contemporary outfit offering it a fig leaf of respectability. I pressed play, the tour got going, and the main protagonist talked confessionally about being over-worked and infertile while a narrator gave facts and figures about ecology and banking. So far so good.

My first impression was that this audio tour had very high production values; this was not the work of one man and his dictaphone, this was like the BBC on a good day. The other thing that became quickly clear was I needed to keep up. This was an immersive audio tour which demanded I walk with it: when the narrator said "walk forwards" I had to walk forwards for the tour to make sense. My movements were being choreographed and I only had as long to look at a scene as had been allotted me in the recording. The pace was upbeat and did not allow for dawdling or reflection. I also quickly noticed that the directions that were  being given were neither obvious nor clear. For example, I was told to go up an escalator opposite an opticians. I headed for an escalator opposite a Boots, which turned out to be a Boots chemist with an opticians inside. Anyone trying to speak plainly and give directions in the UK would say take the escalator opposite the Boots (a popular store in the Britain) but this tour avoided saying their name and offering their brand 'the oxygen of publicity'. This set the tour off an a conspicuously anti-capitalist footing. All the while I was thinking about this and following the instructions, I was peering at the dirty hand marks on the pillar and wondering how and why they had come about.

I then got settled into the tour which combined the story of a city worker whose girlfriend had left him to live off-grid, with an explanation of the relationship of finance to ecology in The City of London with operatic voices, instructions of where to walk, a music score and sound effects thrown in for good measure. It was a dense sonic package. With so many elements it could have easily descended into a chaotic soup but, for the most part, it was scored sparingly and logically so it was easy enough to follow. The main actor's delivery was a little over-wrought for my liking, which is a way of saying I didn't quite see why he was talking so candidly to me. What's more, I came over time to view him as being there mainly in order to serve the purposes of the audio tour, that's to say in order to give it a human point of entry and avoid it becoming too much facts, figures and politics.

Most of the directions were given by a cooler-headed female narrator who told me to cross the road. Probably because the traffic island that I was meant to cross at no longer existed, I was too focussed on where I was meant to walk and didn't notice the approaching cars until the last moment and had to scramble to the other side of the road to avoid being flattened. I then went in search of the Roman excavation The Temple of Mithras but found instead a Bloomberg construction site where this ancient temple once sat. 

The City of London can have an elemental beauty to it and this came out when being led around Bank underground station. A driving musical crescendo accompanied by intonations on global warming and the rising sea level transformed the glum corridors into something far more than themselves and concluded with a scene that could have been choreographed: a businessman raised up on a platform in front of me, standing in profile, talking animatedly into his phone, flanked on either side by a silver dragon. A captain of industry if ever there was one. 

As I was listening to the voices telling me to walk, turn, stop and push the button on the traffic lights, it struck me that in the eight years since And While London Burns was produced, there has been a more thorough penetration of navigational software into cars. Robotic Jill was already around back then telling you to turn right in 100 meters, but these Tom Tom style devices have since become the norm in the car when travelling unfamiliar routes. They are not infallible and I've seen some people treat them more as suggestions than instructions but, one way or another, they have worked their way into the car and by extension, the imagination. As something of a non-driver and someone who enjoys getting pleasantly lost now and then, I realised my first instinct on hearing these directions wasn't to simply follow then but rather, it was to think about them, to visualise them and decide whether I should go along with them or not.

The Nat West Tower swung into view and the story moved onto natural resources. I remember there was quite a lot of information about oil and banking which amounted to 'they're in it together'. It was the stuff of George Monbiot articles and as such, not unfamiliar. The result was I became a little too over-aware of the intentions of the piece. I felt it had been conceived to educate me and change my behaviour. It desperately wanted me to see the light, go green and save the planet. When this unambiguous message was combined with voices telling me to turn left, walk forwards, stop at the traffic lights and look up at the sky, I felt an opposite push from inside of me reasserting the integrity of my own experience and reflections. I guess I just cannot bear propaganda, even when it is for a cause I am sympathetic towards.

I was led down the exact same obscure passageway that I myself use in my London Tour of All Tours. This got me wondering whether there was an aesthetic dimension to this use of space, namely that artists are attracted to this passageway as it is disorienting and offers a fresh eye on The City. Knowing that this tour passes this way I shall, I suppose, have to weave it into my Tour of All Tours and find a space for it in my narrative immediately after the Occupy Tour and Critical Mass tour. I have a dilemma however, as most the tours I mention in this area are already of an anti-capitalist variety and I could really do with a pro-business tour in order to balance my treatment of The City, instead of ladling out more of this stuff.    

I was then led directly below the old Nat West Tower or, as it is prosaically known today, Tower 42. One of the voices said, 'it is windy' and it certainly was. By this time I was starting to feel the cold biting; a chill wind was sweeping around the tall buildings making this lonely walkway seem all the more desolate. The tour's theme of global warming could not have felt more distant at this moment; I was more concerned about how much longer this walk would take and where I would go to warm up afterwards. This was not climate change denial, it was the simple tendency to concentrate on what's immediate: while London was burning I was shivering.

While I had already had my doubts that I was walking in the right direction, there came a point a little later when it became patently clear things were not going according to plan. I was meant to be circling a building that I could not locate and, choosing this block instead, I came  to an impasse. I had been warned that this would happen by a friend and lecturer Theron Schmidt, who had produced an up to date annotated map indicating the correct route which detailed some of the changes in the buildings' usage. I didn't come armed with it, however, as I felt the way The City might have other plans for me is just as much a part of the tour as following the instructions to the letter. I therefore wandered back and forth looking for the restaurant that the anguished protagonist was talking about and listened to him and his girlfriend talking about getting out of The City. 

There was a moment when I was asked to stand next to a tree and to look up at its branches towards the sky. It was far too cold to relax into a hippie moment like that: I looked, I saw, I waited a moment, I moved on.

Spinning away from The Gherkin I must have got the directions confused and took a wrong route down to The Thames. Whether that was my fault for not listening closely enough, the recording's fault for not being clear or nobody's fault and simply the result of the architecture and street layout having changed, I couldn't say. However it happened, I was now walking down one street and listening to the description of another. The tour didn't really suffer as a result of this, if anything it gave it an added layer of interest as I imagined myself walking a few hundred metres along a parallel lane. This gave me the opportunity to observe that whilst the street directions were specific such as cross over the road at the Costa, the content was far less wedded to it and for the most part could work anywhere in The City.

I was instructed to enter The Monument, which I spied in the distance, so I trotted over to it in haste to make up for lost time. I was then told I'd have to pay the two pound entry ticket. In the eight years since And While London Burns was made the entry price of The Monument has doubled to four pounds. Now call me stingy if you will, but I was already having decidedly mixed feelings about the audio tour and to then support this London tourist attraction's hyper-inflation by paying four pounds to walk up the insides of this tower was more than I really cared to do. OK so I missed out on the panoramic view but I was quite able to imagine it and besides, I was curious about life on street level.

I instead stood at the foot of The Monument to the fire of London and here the reasoning behind the name And While London Burns became very clear. The Monument was a confident mark of rebuilding the city after the devastation of the fire and we, faced with our contemporary crisis of climate change, could take bold action, tackle the problem and shape a new future too. As I imagined myself ascending the steps to the top of The Monument the narration stopped and gave way to a Philip Glass style musical crescendo. This was where the work was really meant to pack its punch and finish leaving the listener exhilarated on high. I instead watched the construction workers from the building site next door taking a break, one of their number feeding the pigeons. This simple act, unexpected from a man in a bright orange suit, had a beauty of its own. I enjoyed watching it because it was intimate, caring and ever so slightly ridiculous. In contrast to the voices from the tour, who seemed like puppets for the cause, this was a completely unscripted, unnecessary action, the sort of thing real people do. The two layers of the experience, the audio recording and the city, need not necessarily stand in opposition but in my experience they were often at tangents as, And While London Burns felt like it had an ideal experience in mind, deviations from which were just that: deviations. Whilst I feel I should have liked this audio-tour more because it was well intentioned and well made, it felt more than a little claustrophobic and, returning to my starting point of The Green Man to warm up over a pint, I was relieved to back amongst chaotic, pluralistic life once again.

The Occupy Tour: an anti-capitalist tour of The City of London

Finally I have got round to taking The Occupy Tour, a tour that is based upon the financial crisis and London's role within the historical development and current state of global capitalism. If that sounds like a lot of digest, you're right it is, but it all boils down to an anti-capitalism tour, more or less, and one that proved to be very well attended too.

The tour started on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, the site that the Occupy protesters took after being prevented from occupying the London Stock Exchange back in 2011. I remember standing on these same steps back then and listening to the geographer David Harvey speaking to a large crowd on the relation of capital to city space and how he strongly supported the Occupy initiatives that were taking place worldwide. I think his writings should be worth looking at in relation to both this tour and The Tour of Tours more generally as he does go into the contested functions of public space quite considerably. This tour began not with a reading from Harvey, however, but instead with a reading from the letters of St Paul about possessions and money, a reading that addressed, rather aptly, the church's compromised role in finally supporting the eviction of the protesters.

The tour made its way from point to point taking shelter whenever possible from the rain. It should not be a shock in London to have to deal with a bit of rain when on a tour, but it has been a particularly damp time recently and I have the feeling I been enduring one sodden tour after another of late. Between stops we were encouraged to play "Spot the Tax Dodger". Predictably enough Starbucks was on the list and so too was Boots who, we were told, have assigned their corporate headquarters to a post office box in Switzerland, a move detailed in the UK Uncut campaign. 

We stopped outside many buildings that belonged to the different people and institutions who, we were told, were in their own ways responsible for the crisis. Our two guides took it in turns to explain the roles each of these different institutions played such as here describing the evolution of the Lord Mayor of London's office. This was quite interesting but what gave the tour an extra twist were the responses of the people inside the buildings. Here, we had someone opening the door and asking the tour to move away. We did... about 10 meters to the right, so that we were now assembled in front of another of their doors. The man then banged futilely on this other door from the inside to show his displeasure, but the street belonged to the crowd so the quotes from then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2006 and 2007 on the wisdom of light touch regulation of financial services, kept on flowing.

We came to the headquarters of the Rothschild family's businesses in London and heard how they built their empire, in part, through acting as the financier of national war bonds. Their present status is less important, we were told, as they had relaxed into being merely super wealthy and producing hyper-expensive wine in their vineyards in France. Now I think of it, I was once shown a large number of bottles of their wine whilst taking a truly surreal tour around the Reignwood Wine collection in Beijing. I might have to repeat that wine tour this spring when I will again be in Beijing so I can cover it here on the blog.

Once again we came across disapproving security guards speaking into their radios and not quite knowing what to do with us. Finally a colleague of his emerged and said, "No photographs, private property." It was the best he could come up with, a symbolic way of saying, "We don't like you, you are not welcome."  

They used a lot of laminated A3 pictures to illustrate their stories, such as this one on the founding of the stock exchange. I'm quite familiar with this use of cards having seen it on many other tours but the one thing that was more novel and which I rather liked was their hats. The rest of their clothing was relatively normal and would not attract much attention but their hats gave the whole tour a theatrical, not to say sartorial, lift. Top hats function as historical references that reminded me of the Victorian and Georgian eras, which was quite appropriate with this tour in which the past and present constantly intermingled. This mixing of time frames was, in fact, both the tours strength and weakness. It allowed them to make connections and explain how we got here, however, it was at the same time so scattered that it was impossible to extract a clear argument or thread from the tour, which instead felt like a catalogue of annoying and unjust things about the City of London.

The two of them performed well as a double act; here they are talking about Monty Norman the Nazi sympathising Governor of The Bank of England. What's more, they didn't just rely upon each other, they also brought members of the audience into their act by asking them to answer questions, translate phrases and even sing songs. Compared to the last time I took a tour with two guides who were at crossed purposes, this was a very harmonious duo. 

The tour came to The Guildhall, a site already known to me from The Machiavelli Reinterpreted Tour and here they made a gently provocative gesture through writing on the wall of The Guildhall in chalk. This diagram explains the medieval system of representation in The City of London which today ensures the mayor remains a person appointed by the banks.

We then stood in front of Chicago University's European Campus located in Woolgate Exchange but were cleared off this spot by another zealous security guard who had a contented 'job well done' look on his face when he managed to get us to the other side of the street. I can only think that these men have a very poor understanding of public relations as these actions only heightened the sense that these institutions had something to feel ashamed of and were embarrassed by this attention. Security guards and those who manage them tend to see things differently.

Chalk was again used to good effect to produce this table showing the income of the top 1% and level of public debt in an effort to debunk the free-market theories of the Chicago School of economic thought. The apparent failure of these economic theories and policies to behave as predicted has not yet made any apparent dent on the prestigious university campus located in the heart of the financial city. I would have liked one of their economics professors to have come out of the building and defended the theories, but that was not to be. It was a Saturday after all.

We then went over to Deutsche Bank where the topic was the consolidation of debt and the financial products and instruments that were behind the collapse of sub-prime mortgages. This was made a little more entertaining by including a rap composed by a former employee of the bank on the subject of the Collateralized Debt Obligation Market.

"CDO Oh Baby" to the tune of Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice

Yo vip let's kick it!
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby
All right, stop, collaborate and listen
Spreads are wide with a technical invasion
Home Eq Subs were trading so tightly
Until Hedge Funds Bot Protection daily and nightly
Will they stop? Yo I don't know

Turn up the Arb and let's go
To the extreme Macro Funds do damage like a vandal
Now, BBBs are trading with a new handle
Print, even if the housing bubble looms
There are never ends to real estate booms
If there is a problem, yo, we'll solve it

Check out the spreads while my structurer revolves it
C D O oh baby, C D O oh baby"

The guards looked on unimpressed as usual but did not intervene. In the background there is some of the bank's substantial art collection on show and I noted that they offer tours of their art collection, I might just have to take one to see things from that point of view. 

The last stop on the tour was the Moorgate branch of Nat West, a bank that is owned by RBS. There was a whole lot more talk about the government bailout of this bank and its unethical investments and as I was listening to this I looked around and saw the sentry box that marks the 'ring of steel' the security checkpoints installed in the 90s to tighten police control of the city's entrances and exits following IRA bombings. It was striking how it seems to more or less follow the old Roman Wall of London which, incidentally, is a tour route as well. This city within a city, or even state within a state, as some consider it, is essential to any understanding of what is going on elsewhere in the city and well beyond. The tour concluded with many thank yous, a steadfast refusal to accept money for the tour, encouragement to get involved with the issues raised and current campaigns such as that to remove the post of The City Remembracer and a final near ubiquitous gesture that I was not expecting. They said, "if you have enjoyed the tour then rate us on Trip Advisor!" It seems like this company and its website is the glue that connects people with tours in London today. 

The tour finished in the Red Lion where the bar staff kept trying to pour short pints, ie not fill up the glass completely, even though it was an over-priced generic city pub. On second thought that might precisely be why they were pouring short but that, in any case, didn't deter a significant tranche of anti-capitalists mixing and talking about the tour, about Occupy and much else besides. I've come to notice that the tours that generally finish in the pub are the ones where there is already a greater degree of connectedness between those taking it: tours around a very specific topic or political tours, like this one. The more general tourist oriented tours rarely have this social dimension. While most of the tours I've reviewed so far that have ended this way have been lefty tours, I would be shocked if this were not also the case with other groups and different political persuasions. I don't quite have it in me to test a BNP or EDL tour, if such a thing exists, but I can well imagine it finishing in a pub too.