The Jewish Refugee Museum of Shanghai Tour

I have noticed that there are Jewish history tours in many cities across Europe and I have been meaning to take one of them for a while to see what they are like. For one reason or another I never got round to it but did instead recently discover that there was one in Shanghai. I never realised that the city had a significant Jewish history so, rather than discovering the Jewish history of Paris, Prague or Porto, it was to China's most populous city Shanghai that I turned.   

I found it amusing that when I stepped inside I was asked to wear an elasticated plastic bag around my shoes. The reason given was to keep the place clean but, since I have not had this request in other museums, I began asking myself whether it was because the building was a former synagogue. Lost in such speculation, I didn't precisely catch what the guide was trying to tell my group. I was on the English language tour and my group mostly consisted of elderly Jewish American who had come on a Smithsonian Journeys package tour of China. Upstairs, another group was on the Chinese tour.

On this metal wall outside were the names of the Shanghai Jews as recorded in the city register. I saw two American men studying it carefully, looking for the names of family members. They were clearly moved when they found one. Our guide, however, had no obvious Jewish ancestry. He did, however, have a keen interest in Jewish history and culture and while he had an odd accent, even by Chinese standards, his English was good and he could tell the story with some precision and charm.

Stepping into the modern museum, we watched a grainy video and were then shown around the exhibits. We touched upon this one about Ho Feng Shan who our guide dubbed 'the Chinese Schindler'. It seems he had a particularly vivid life and there was only time time to hear about his role in issuing a large number of exit visas permitting Jews in Austria to escape to Shanghai. His actions were not officially recognised in his lifetime, indeed he fell out with the ROC government who denied him his pension over a dispute he claimed was politically motivated. Settling in California, it was only after he died that he was publicly thanked and his wartime actions held up first by Israel and then, interestingly, by the PRC. At least, that is how the history is told here. An interesting candidate for a bio-pic, I would say.

The guide stopped to show us this map of the different routes Jews took to come to Shanghai. Because the museum contained so much material, when explanations were given at all, they were often somewhat rushed in order to keep the tour under an hour in length. This meant I did not appreciate until later that different Jewish groups had been settling in the city for some period of time before the war and there existed stratification amongst them. 

This picture of the Israeli Prime Minister put a face on something I had been increasingly feeling through the tour. Namely, that in order to understand this museum it was important to understand the processes by which it came about and to ask whether it served any purposes in addition to that of remembrance. The narrative of the Shanghai Jews, while known to some, was not celebrated until fairly recently. A number of things had to happen to thaw what were not immediately warm relations between the states of Israeli and the PRC, created in 1948 and 1949 respectively, in order for this episode of history to be given the embassy treatment. In China that would be the process of political and economic reform from the 80s onwards. In Shanghai, its relative calm during the political turbulence of 1989 combined with the more recent taking stock of and promotion of the city's heritage, must figure too. As for the Israeli side, I know less, though there are, apparently, early movements afoot in transforming Hongkou into a 'new Xintiandi' with Israeli investment. Whether these financial relations are simply the fruits of improved diplomatic relations and a shared history or are in some way the motor for political engagement and cultural diplomacy, is difficult to say.

This is the short video Xie Xie Shanghai that was made in 2015 and which features Benjamin Netanyahu, amongst others, saying thank you to the city for providing Jewish refugees shelter during the war. The video is curious in that it mixes a political message  with tourist aesthetics. The beach and bar scenes come straight out of a 'Visit Israel' promotional video and is another example of the tourist gaze exceeding itself and finding its way, now, into state level diplomacy. 

The top floor of the museum was where Shanghai's Jewish history was put into the service of political education. Most notable was this educational video (chapter 4) that contrasted Western thought with Chinese thought. Western thought was characterised as conquering nature and as the science of evolution, which slid effortlessly into Nazism, while Chinese thought centred upon living in harmony with nature. Confucian values were attributed to the Jewish American politician Michael Blumenthal, values that rubbed off on him during the time he grew up a refugee in Shanghai. Essentially, anything positive was linked to traditional Chinese culture while anything negative was of Western origin. I had the impression that whoever produced the video was not used to having to defend their opinions in any sort of open debate. If they had, they would have had to have come up with something a bit more refined and robust. In the UK such a video would simply be laughed at then ignored but here it passes for normal.

The museum is today's focal point to the Jewish heritage of Hongkou, but the neighbourhood also has a walking route taking in other historic sites, too. There was not so much to see and a guide would have helped to bring the otherwise blank addresses to life. Disturbingly, a series of public artworks on the side of the street commemorating the area's Jewish heritage, had been slashed. This one shows the youthful American artist Peter Max, being taught to paint. Who did this, or why it happened, I have no idea. There is no significant history of anti-Semitism in Shanghai, as far as I am aware, but there is more to this story than my brief tour could reveal.

Final stop was The White Horse Cafe, a reconstruction of a Jewish cafe that used to do business nearby. The place was unusual not only on account of the man inexplicably crashed out on the lawn outside, but also because it was a European-style cafe run by and for Chinese customers. I should be used to this concept by now as we have had French-themed cafe chains in the UK, such as Cafe Rouge, for a while. I seem to remember that last time I went to a Cafe Rouge (a rare event) they had employed some foreign students as their waiters, but I also recall that the whole place felt like a protracted and ever so slightly embarrassing fancy dress party. White Horse Cafe had the same vibe. Here, this game was augmented by an exhibition upstairs about Polish Catholics saving Jews. The exhibition was sponsored by a southern Polish regional governmental body, an area trying to establish connections in Shanghai on the back of the Jewish Refugee Museum. While the story that the exhibition panels recounted was no doubt true, the whole thing smacked just a little too obviously of political opportunism to be taken entirely at face value.  

The Shikumen Open House Museum Tour: a Shanghai heritage simulation

The Shikumen Museum is a small-scale museum in Shanghai's Xintiandi district that is both housed inside and shows the typical life of a shikumen style of house. These predominantly three-storey houses were popular constructions in the city during the 19th and 20th centuries, though many have since become dilapidated or been replaced with high-rise. You enter the museum through a gift store which seemed to be mostly full of brightly coloured Karl Lagerfeld nik-nacs: busts with oversized heads, handbags and, of course, sunglasses. The shop had no obvious relationship to the museum other than this is where the reasonably priced tickets are bought. 20 RMB will not buy you very much in Xintiandi, this is an area where a coffee can set you back as much as 58 RMB, but it will get you into the museum and, if you come at the right time, onto their guided tour, too.

There is the expression in English, 'too many cooks spoil the broth' and there really should also be the expression, 'too many guides spoil the tour'. I guess we only have the former because people care a lot more about soup than guided tours, but the two of them are equally true. Tours given by two guides almost always suffer when each guide tries to take it in different directions but here the problem was something different again: neither guide really wanted to take the tour in any sort of direction at all. Perhaps in having two of them guiding us around, it offered them safety in numbers. This quite possibly held them back: if either of them were giving the tour by themselves they'd have known they'd had to up their game. As it was, we coasted through. Both of them were volunteers, possibly students, and they gave the impression of not really knowing very much about the place: the young man carried the tour's script rolled up in his hand. Because they basically knew only what was written down for them, they were unable to answer questions with any authority. They were, in effect, a living breathing version of the audio tour.

On the wall of the ground floor living room hung this wedding photo of the previous owners of the building, or so I was told. I took a picture of it and was immediately told by the male guide that it is bad luck to take the picture of a picture of people who have passed away. This was a rare and welcome moment of him going off-script and speaking as himself. I'd never heard of this belief before but one of the others in the group did seem familiar with it so it must come from somewhere. For me, it made me immediately think of the The Ring, the Japanese horror movie about a death curse linked to the reproduction and viewing of a video. So far, I seem to have got away with taking this picture, I have not been attacked by an undead bride with long black hair draped over her face. But who knows? Maybe this Benjamin-esque curse skips one level of mechanical reproduction and is now activated by the internet, a threat to all you readers of this blog. Beware!

We cruised around the museum. When I asked if all the objects were original the guide told me that some had been taken from other houses in the area. What we were looking at was, then, an assortment of objects displayed to appear as if they were the possessions of the family who lived in the building. Here in the master bedroom I asked myself how the curatorial process of accumulating, selecting and presenting the objects changed the look and feel of the space from how it would have appeared a century ago. One thing immediately stuck me as I stood here and gazed around: everything was so neat. In a genuinely lived in house there is almost always clutter. When I mentioned this to one of the guides, he retorted, "it's just a museum." 

We next came to the son's room. Looking at the framed photograph of the young boy, placed at the back of the table, I asked myself who this model boy might have been and wondered why he would have put a picture of himself on his writing desk. Was he a deeply narcissistic or nostalgic young man? The more closely I looked at this boy's things, the more my faith in his veracity was thrown into doubt. Did the ghost family in the photograph ever even have a son or was he and his possessions also something that was picked up from the assorted odds and ends discovered in the other houses? Seeing as this was "just a museum" everything was now floating in the half-light of representation. What was this construction trying to show me? Did this style of shikumen life ever exist?

Arriving at the top floor, we crossed over into a gallery space. Here all pretence of these being traditional buildings was dropped. The two guides left us to make our own way around the exhibition since there was signage next to the exhibits and there were videos that explained all things shikumen, too. The gallery was one of those that documented and presented that which it had replaced, making it into an acceptable object of nostalgia. The actual shikumen that still stand, however, as they usually house poorer residents, are far less likely to invoke such feelings.

I made my way downstairs, through the bling of the gift-shop and stepped outside onto the street. Looking at the museum from the side it became clearer that this is all reconstituted heritage. Most of the buildings on the block were torn down, some redesigning took place to make them suitable as shops, they were then rebuilt using modern materials and a choice selection of original architectural details were put back in place to lend their authenticity. This style of redevelopment is rather new to China where the wholesale obliteration of neighbourhoods followed by the construction of giant malls has been the model. This is, then, a specifically Chinese style of postmodernity where this new cleaned up image of the shikumen has come to displace the old one. This embrace of the simulation has been driven by consumerism and tourism. Tourists come here for the shopping and dining and they come here to take endless selfies in front of the fountains, reconstructed shikumen buildings and shops. With the poor moved on, the buildings cleaned up and luxury brands plastered in every window, this now represents a past worth remembering. The question that remains unclear to me is to what extent the idea of these buildings being heritage is able to spread beyond Xintiandi. Does Xintiandi kick start a popular reevaluation of the urban landscape of Shanghai or, is it simply a high-end shopping mall and tourist destination with seriously over-priced coffee?

The Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression Tour

Beijing has its tourist sights, and I've seen most of the major ones, one way or another, by now. However, when I read that there was a museum I had not yet visited and that it had an audio guide, I needed no further encouragement. OK so the museum turned out to be the anti-Japanese museum which is more a political place than a standard tourist place but no problem, that's what this blog is for. I was hooked. Getting to this museum proved to be a minor challenge as it is located in an out of the way spot far from any subway stations on the West 5th ring road. Although Beijing is a capital city and has its international community, it's somewhat localised and this area was clearly well off that map.

Parked outside of the Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression were clusters of black cars, the type synonymous with Communist Party officials and 'don't give a fuck' drivers. The museum's name hardly rolls of the tongue but each part of it is there for a reason, as I was to discover. Passing through the airport style security at the entrance, I was asked to show ID and when the woman at the desk realised I could speak a bit of Chinese she was quite friendly and handed me a free ticket. I'm guessing they don't see many foreign visitors here outside of political guests invited for formal occasions.

I rented one of the audio handsets from the information desk where two ladies were drinking tea. The audio tour was very formal in the sense that the woman speaking gave absolutely nothing of herself. It sounded like the script had been written by an official historian and her job was simply to deliver the message over discrete Chinese elevator music. Her English was passable but she had a strong accent and broken rhythm which made for a monotonous commentary. Sometimes the accumulation of dates, names and numbers can have a hypnotic effect beating the listener into submission but this audio tour didn't even achieve that, it simply banalised the material. Once in a while new sentences had been dropped into the pre-existing recording but they had not managed to do this smoothly so these words popped out and drew attention to themselves.

There were lots of maps and displays of war memorabilia; the most popular items proved to be the guns.

A striking thing about the period photos was that there was one that looked quite unlike any of the others. Whereas the rest were grainy photographs, snapshots salvaged from the past, this one looked like it had been photoshopped just a little too energetically.

The staff, who outnumbered the visitors to the museum, wore a variety of uniforms: many of the men looked more like soldiers than museum attendants while the women looked like police clerks. What they had in common was they pretty much all looked utterly bored. I became interested in observing how the different members of staff seemed to cope with the challenge of working in such a sleepy environment. There were some who appeared bored in a very stoic professional way displaying a degree of dignity and gravitas. Others gathered in pairs and spent the afternoon stretching out a prolonged gossip while some sat alone playing with their phones their entire body sinking into a cloud of entropy. The lights in many of the rooms were set to a motion detector and only illuminated when someone entered. This got me playing with them looking for where the sensor was located and then sneaking up into the darkened room. I guess I was looking for things to entertain myself with and that is where the museum took me.

It was all too easy to switch off but then every now and then I'd see something that would jolt me back into the present such as this Japanese torture instrument put on display to show what life was like under occupation.

The translation of the audio tour and signage was neither good nor bad, it was simply heavy handed and while it had its Chinglish moments it managed to avoid any genuinely laugh out loud funny mistakes. For example, again and again the Japanese were described as wantonly doing this or that to the point that I could be pretty well be sure that she'd throw in at least one wantonly in each paragraph and I was practically waiting for her to say it. The texts more or less repeated the same information and expanded upon it with the odd spelling mistake and formatting error here and there but again, nothing drastic that took me seriously outside of the material.

20th Century Chinese history is anything but simple. The museum nonetheless offered an authoritative version of what happened. Not knowing the intricacies of it myself I had to simply wander around and soak up what was given. That said, I did notice a few things that left more questions than answers such as this photograph of Chiang Kai-shek with his wife and the American Joseph Stilwell. The commentary I had heard up to this point had stressed how the fight against the Japanese had been led by the Communist party and then, here was the a photo of the Americans who were assisting the fight against the Japanese, but they seemed to be closer with the other side in the Chinese Civil War, the republicans led by Chiang Kai-shek. Why were the Americans siding with them if they were the junior partner?

The narrative that was built up by the text was that the Republicans were in favour of compromising with the Japanese and some even formed a puppet state under Japanese rule. Other versions of the history exist, however, which counter this marginalising of the Republican role in fighting the Japanese such as that recently offered by Taiwanese Hao Bosun.

The issue I read underneath this was that the Civil War, interrupted by the Japanese invasion, was the defining period of the Chinese Communist Party and quite possibly the catalyst that brought them to power. The exhibition wanted to emphasise their legitimacy over the Kuomintang, who finally took shelter in Taiwan. The tricky thing here is that the issue of Taiwan is an ongoing sovereignty dispute with competing territorial claims and the exhibition was quite obviously laying out the PRC's official position on the matter. Looking at this I was reminded of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London as that's a museum that ostensively sets out to show the reality of war but inevitably shows it from a very British perspective without even seeming to set out to do so. In that sense the place is not so obviously trying to make you believe a certain line, it is itself a manifestation of an underlying national ideology. I used to sometimes visit the IWM with a friend and we'd walk around and laugh at how old fashioned it was and imitate the retired soldiers who worked there as guides telling their war stories to whoever would listen. It wasn't possible to extract that sort of ironic humour out of this visit as this was not my country's vanity on show and besides, the very real mass killing resulting from the Japanese occupation was too present in the displays. Still, the question remained with me throughout, what are the purposes behind the creation of this museum that opened only in 1987? 

The most prominent display was saved towards the end of the tour, the scene of Japan's surrender. The fact that this was life-sized and also featured as a painting was difficult not to miss.

There was a large notice on display reading "Chinese and Japanese People Should Be Friends Forever" and nearby it was this picture. This brought to the surface the second underlying tension in the museum: contemporary China-Japan relations. I have the impression that there remains widespread popular hostility towards the Japanese in China today, though that doesn't necessarily stop people buying their cars. While the government wants to maintain peaceful relations and restrict conflict to the realm of economics, peaceful relations are on certain terms and one of those is the full acknowledgment of Japanese culpability in the war. Alongside that are more worldly territorial claims, neither of which are currently being fully met. This museum was indeed the location for a presidential speech along those lines.

Anti-Japanese TV dramas are a big deal in China; if you switch on the TV at any time of the day and flick through the channels, chances are you'll find one. The wall shows many moments from these dramas, which most mainland Chinese visitors will be familiar with to a greater or lesser extent. I couldn't help but again make analogies with my own country which for a long time saturated itself in Second World War movies that reassured the British public that they were on the side of the righteous. I already felt that those movies were kind of stale to me when I was growing up in the 80s so I am surprised to see how prominent such movies and TV series still are here in China today. With such a long time having now elapsed between the war and our present day, animosities must be drawn mostly from movies and second hand experiences, rather than direct experience. As such, getting the story right is more important than ever as it is all too possible to stoke hatred for political expediency or even for plain entertainment value. With such divergent interests and narratives between China, Japan and Taiwan it is difficult to see where any sort of consensus can emerge. With this in mind I left the museum tuning over Nietzsche's line "there are no facts only interpretations". I later read the museum's website which claims it has received over 16.6 million visitors since opening, a number that I find hard to believe based on my visit where I saw about 10 visitors in the space of an hour and a half. I have the feeling they are quite happy to interpret facts very liberally here, and as such, a visit to this museum is most definitely educative, though I'm not sure the lessons I took away with me were those that were intended. 

The Jane Austen Centre Tour: literature as lifestyle

The Jane Austen Centre, Bath, is squeezed into a Georgian house and spread over two floors with the third floor, up top, given over to a tea room. At the front door a middle-aged man in period costume, sideburns bristling, hovered around, occasionally waving at the passing tourist buses trying to drum up business. I could see how his job could easily become a soul destroying one if he invested too much of himself in it. I slipped past, got my ticket from a lady, also in period costume, who ushered me up onto the 1st floor.

There I waited for fifteen minutes until the next introduction to the centre was due to start. At first alone and then with a small but growing group, I watched a promotional video for the Jane Austen Festival, which takes place annually in Bath and features literary events, dances, walks, concerts and dinners. Much of it appeared to have next to nothing to do with literature except for the fact that Austen wrote about these things. There is, I realised, a big market for fans to enter into the world of the novels that they hold dear: they've already bought the books, the next step is workshops in the dances that Austen may have enjoyed.

A young woman entered and then ushered us into the next room where she gave us an introduction to the life and work of Jane Austen. I have to confess to not having read cover to cover any of her novels; I received a truly awful education in English literature that pretty much poisoned the entire English cannon for me. So, In order to get better acquainted with Austin's oeuvre, I have just watched an adaptation of Northanger Abbey. It looked like a good quality Mills & Boon story. Indeed, taking a look at the Mills & Boon website, like you do, I noticed that they have a 24-book Regency Society series of brassiere busters. I know that TV adaptations are almost always going to have a dumbing down effect on literature and I also see it was a vastly different thing for Austen to write novels back then than it is for the M&B stable of authors to pump out their slim tomes destined to fill charity shops. Still, it is ultimately girl meets boy stuff. That said, even though I was through with it by about 20 minutes and was then watching it mainly for the Bath angle, I did hang on till the bitter, or should I say saccharine sweet end, when they got married, had a baby and lived happily ever after. You can't leave things like that dangling in the air.

  

We were shown a picture of Austin's family home in Chawton, Hampshire which is today the Jane Austen's House Museum. I got the distinct impression that it was by far the larger and more prestigious establishment and that this smaller Bath centre, existed because the city is a major tourist destination and the setting of two of her novels. The Bath connection is, then, not wholly tenuous, even if it takes the form of a museum primarily because of tourist money. I noticed some much more opportunistic literary acquisition still in the shape of Birmingham's claim to some of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle glory on the basis of a few months' work there spread over 3 years. Portsmouth has their angle on his time there, Edinburgh can claim his birthplace, London has 221b Baker street and Crowborough, his home in Sussex, is in with a punt too. There's no reason why there should only be one museum to these figures, but in the case of Jane Austen and Bath, I felt it superfluous in that they didn't really have anything very original to show, the original objects are held elsewhere. The relationship between the author and city was, here, not that of the city showing off its finest sons and daughters but rather the city using its relations with famous figures to show off itself. Bath is in the enviable position of having been a society resort to which practically all of the 18th Century canonical English authors would have paid a visit. This opens up the possibility of many more museums where this one came from.

The introductory talk lasted no more than 20 minutes and we were then led downstairs into the exhibition space and left to it. There were displays like the one which work the Austen in Bath angle; both Austin the writer and the lives of her literary creations.

Following this was a video that explained it a whole lot more. There were some nice shots of the architecture and a spectral Georgian lady making her way along the streets. It looked a bit like a ghost walk but I suppose the idea is that the presence of Austen remains tangible in the city today. It was striking that the Bath of this video looked almost exactly like the Bath of the walking tours. No Primark and absolutely no Poundland.

An actor who had starred in one of the adaptations of her novels a few years back gave the authoritative narrative that strung the video together. It featured many clips from film adaptations and the whole package was politely short so that it didn't try the visitors' patience. If there are multiple levels and nuances to her work, as I'm guessing their must be, they were not evinced here. The centre, when taken as a whole, seemed to celebrate Jane Austin and the Bath lifestyle that she led and wrote about, while leaving her actual literary works more or less untouched.

Moving on, I came to a wardrobe of clothes and here I am playing at being the Georgian gentleman. Dressing up in period costume was more popular with the ladies: I was the only man attired this and the choice of men's clothes was far more limited. Looking at the picture now, I think I look a bit stranded in the 21st century, not quite able to make that leap back. I do have some pictures from my dim past working on TV period dramas, however, and in these I am a little more fully makeover for the 18th and 19th centuries. Thinking back to those costume drama experiences, I seem to remember the programmes almost always found themselves caught in the dilemma that the audience and actors didn't actually want to go too far down the line of historical accuracy. If it's done too thoroughly, the actors get stuck with weird haircuts and facial hair that interferes with their other work and they have to learn accents and mannerisms that today's audience struggle to understand. So that is how it was in the centre too: we all remained stranded in our presents, the costumed staff in the centre and tourists dressing up for Georgian dinners and dances.

This is a picture that was taken a few weeks ago when I visited the centre for the unveiling of their latest exhibit. I only had the time that day to see the final exhibit, this 'lifelike' waxwork model of Jane Austen based upon a single sketch and written descriptions of her. There are now 'no photography' signs up around it. I'm trying to understand the impulse to stop photography since taking pictures has become so much a part of what tourists do. No 1 Royal Crescent also has a picture ban as does Denis Severs House in London, which I reviewed a few months ago. There is an article in The Telegraph supporting a photo ban, but reading through the comments it is interesting to see how normal people are more inclined to allow photography, as indeed am I. While I think there is a problem of some people paying too much attention to artworks through the lens of their camera and not looking closely enough when lacking a screen, I believe educating people to look rather than banning this principal form of image distribution is the answer. The Jane Austen Centre banning just this single exhibit seems odd and it could have been done for two reasons, as far as I can see. The first was to protect the sculpture from flash photography. I don't know how it was made and if it is sensitive to flash, so maybe there's something there. The second reason is simply to protect postcard sales. This Jane Austen lookalike sculpture and the dressing up option in the previous room are practically the only two photo worthy moments in a visit to the centre. Having many pictures like the above double portrait in circulation brings more attention to the centre and Jane Austen more generally. A similar debate takes place in the performance field and I am of the opinion that it is better to embrace the camera as this then leaves records that provoke memories and spark conversations.

And then, spat back onto the street, I saw this: blokish humour co-existing with Georgian make believe. Faced with such a contrast I see how there is a space for a Jane Austen Centre. Bath is a divided city and the lines are only starting to become a bit more visible. If it is possible to find tours that can make these evident is a challenge, but I'm out every day with a new tour, so lets see.

The No. 1 Royal Crescent Tour: a period drama minus the drama

A further 'must see' site in Bath that offers a tour of sorts is No. 1 Royal Crescent. I got my ticket from a lady in period costume who then directed me to a side room to watch a video.

The video was a professionally filmed and well edited introduction to Bath and The Royal Crescent in its Georgian hay day. I should admit that I start to become a little bit blasé about these industry standard cultural tourism products when I am trapped inside of them writing about them, but I'm also aware I am not their target audience. For the dedicated cultural tourist, this is the stuff of dreams.    

Once the video ended the small group of us who had accumulated were told the the tour of the house began next door. I was also told that photography inside the house was forbidden but it was OK to take pictures out of the window. These images are therefore of everything but the building and that's a pity as it is rather beautiful inside but they want to hang onto the control of their imagery.

This is the view from the dinning room which was laid out very elaborately for dessert. I was handed a laminated information sheet by the guardian who explained some of the features of the room. The most striking of these was a folding screen in the corner behind which gentlemen, during the course of the dinner, could relieve themselves into a pot. With this in mind I looked again at the table and imagined the scene afresh.

I was told by another guardian that the man of the house and the lady had separate rooms and this I seem to remember is the view from the man's room. The ghost tour which passed this way slipped in some historical information which, at the time, I had thought was off topic. Nonetheless, it was good to know when looking out over the crescent that, post WW2 when the crescent was run down, the city council had proposed knocking it down and replacing it with a big concrete town hall. At least, that is how I remember the story and it is curious that none of the heritage guides told me about this important information. I have just ordered Baedeker's Guide to Great Britain 1937, a sort of Fodor's of its day, which reputedly inspired a series of German bombing raids during the war which were a good part of why this area was in such poor condition come 1945. I find the idea of a guidebook being used to select military targets quite far out and I'll be taking that tour as soon as it arrives in the post.

I wandered from room to room like I was in a movie. Speaking of which I have finally relented and in order to get a better grip on why these locations and Bath in general have such an appeal I have started watching Northanger Abbey, more on which I'll write about when I come to the Jane Austen Centre. I think that this period drama filmset made real, is the desired effect. The next step is to get dressed up in the clothes yourself and go in for the reenactments, speaking of which, I did spot a live role playing group in the car park yesterday dressed up like they stepped out of Lord of The Rings. Wrong costume for Georgian Bath but maybe there is another layer of goblins and sorcerers I have not yet found.

When I descended into the basement to the servant's rooms I was surprised to see these were not so well attended to by the guides. Maybe there was less to steal or maybe it was just somebody's break. There was a kitchen, communal dinning room, scullery and housekeeper's room. The most curious of the objects was the 'turnspit dog' model: a dog that walks inside a wheel which turns meat over a fire. I would have liked to have had the opportunity to go further into the class politics and lives of the workers, even if it was a Downton Abbey whitewash of it, but that was not on offer today.

With the tour of the house proper finished, there was still an exhibition to view in the annex. This featured portraits of women who were sexually 'available' from the higher sections of society. That is to say it combined women who conducted affairs, kept mistresses and high class prostitutes. I thought that including women who had affairs which became public knowledge with prostitutes in the same exhibition was stretching the point a bit far, but I also see that this was done to bring the idea of Georgian morality to the fore in order to then interrogate it through the artworks and commentary. The captions were informative and did convey something of the women's lives and the sexism and double standards of Georgian society: men who conducted affairs and used prostitutes were not subject to any such criticism.

Emerging at the end I felt that there was enough here to call the experience a tour, but I was left wishing I could have been shown round by a guide. Because it is a building that contains expensive objects, they have a primary duty to protect the premises and that is best achieved by having guardians based in each room who can both keep an eye on things and explain the room's contents to the visitor. If they were to have tour guides they would probably be in addition to guardians and not instead of them. When the costs are added up, this 'pass the tourist' system is cheaper and quite adequate for most visitors. It all makes perfect sense but something is lost in not having someone give a through line. In any case, most of the visitors, it seemed to me, were quite happy to have their primary focus on the house itself and not on someone dressed up in period costume hustling them from room to room. The thing the visitors really wanted to do was to soak up the atmosphere of the place and imagine how it would have been to have lived here. They were paying to enter a movie. We have different needs and the need to dream is great too.

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.