“ON YOUR LEFT YOU’LL SEE…”

This week we take a look personal peek at the phenomenon of walking tours and how the tools our ancestors developed for navigating primeval landscapes may have been repurposed to accommodate imagination, creativity and reasoning…

Yesterday morning the security guard at the British Museum politely, but efficiently, went through the contents of my backpack and shoulder bag; three baps, two flasks of coffee, a change of clothes, and a notebook.  The latter was the paper kind, on account of my laptop undergoing a medical a half a mile away with Dr Apple, which is why I was hanging out at the museum, my bijou Bloomsbury office.

“Are you a tour guide?” the guard asked as I packed up my stuff again.

“No, I just squat in the Members Room,” I was a little too quick to reply, given my 4.5 decade involvement in all things tour-guidey, including backstage tours, sightseeing tours (bus, walking, riverboat and GPS guided cars) museum and attraction tours, football stadiums etc.

It all started outside a second hand bookshop on Chiswick High Street back in the late 1970s. I was working as a furniture porter in Turnham Green at the time, while applying for a grant for Film School, and on the stroll back to the underground my eagle eye spotted the tray of ‘bargain’ volumes, ‘only 50p.’  Little did I know that one of them would change my life.

‘The Town, It’s Memorable Characters And Events,” is based on a collection of essays entitled The Streets of London that the poet, publisher and polymath Leigh Hunt penned for his publication London Journal between 1834 and 1835.*   Within those pages, Leigh Hunt lives on as a tour guide par excellence, leading the reader through London, district by district, century by century, and populating each street and alleyway with remarkable stories and figures from the capital’s history.  The city where I had lived and worked all my life, and, to my shame, knew so very little.

But that was soon to change…

Book in hand, I followed in Leigh Hunt’s footsteps, astonished by how so many of the landmarks remained the same as in Hunt’s day, and soon I was taking friends along on the walks with me, adding my own voice to his (INSIDER TIP: no two tour guides ever tell the same stories in the same way).

Hunt was particularly strong on characters from the English stage. A former ‘head-counter’ (a manual precursor to ticketing systems) and respected theatre critic, his writing brings to life the performances of Garrick and Macklin, Kemble and Kean, in a way that transports you back to the best seats in the House, peppering the contemporary accounts with his own inimitable observations and energy.  So when I arrived at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane with Miss Saigon in 1989, I already had enough material to present my own tours of that amazing building for friends and colleagues, while occasionally (and very proudly) standing in for George Hoare, The Lane’s Theatre Archivist and legendary General Manager, when he went on holiday. 

Then the passion spread… 

It took me five years of slogging away before I managed to create the Les Mis Education Department, and it took a further eighteen months of nagging and cajoling my colleagues at CML before I was allowed to produce ‘Behind The Scenes Tours’ at Her Majesty’s Theatre. These took place before the evening performances of The Phantom of the Opera, and the worry was that seeing how everything worked might detract from the theatre-goers’ experience when they saw the performance after the tour.  It never did.

In the footsteps of Homo Tourguidiens...

There is a fundamental human need to understand the landscapes through which we move. For millions of years, the ability to navigate environments, locate food and water, find mates, return to shelter and avoid predators was essential to survival. Some researchers have recently suggested that the neural systems that evolved to support these spatial superpowers were subsequently adapted for more complex cognitive tasks. From this perspective, tools originally developed to navigate physical environments may also underpin our current 'higher' cognitive functions such as memory, planning, imagination, reasoning, creativity and the exploration of abstract ideas.**

‘The firing of place and grid cells conveys positional information to navigate Euclidean space. Here we hypothesis that the spatially constrained firing of place cells and the metric provided by the entorhinal grid system might provide a domain-general mechanism to map dimensions of experience. In this framework, the activity of place cells can be conceived as indexing locations in a cognitive space spanned by the entorhinal grid system. Three further neural coding mechanisms identified in spatial navigation studies illustrate how the hippocampal-entorhinal system may support a core mechanism of mapping cognitive spaces. First, the firing of fields of place and grid cells increase in size along the dorsoventral axis of the rodent hippocampus, in line with mapping of cognitive spaces at different levels of granularity for multi-scale representations of knowledge hierarchies or nested conceptual information. Second, the ability of place cells to undergo global remapping allows the flexible formation of a multitude of uncorrelated maps for different cognitive spaces, which can be reinstated by attractor dynamics. Third, sequential activity of place and grid ells during replay and theta oscillations enables the simulation of trajectories through different locations in a cognitive space for adaptive cognition and behaviour.’

On first discovering Leigh Hunt’s work back there among the flares, clogs and sideburns of '70s Chiswick, I was astonished that such a brilliant writer, with such a brilliant life, should have faded into obscurity. His poems Jenny Kissed Me and Abou Ben Adhem were spectacularly popular with the public for most of the 20^th Century, and his travels around Europe with Byron and Shelley are like biopics of these better known, and highly controversial, literary figures. After being imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent and spending much of his life in chronic financial difficulty, Leigh Hunt found support from a younger generation of writers who admired him. In 1849, a young Charles Dickens organised, produced and performed in a benefit performance at Drury Lane to raise funds for the ageing Leigh Hunt.  And you can imagine my delight when I discovered, purely by chance, a tribute from an even younger writer, Leigh Hunts protégé, the twenty-one year old John Keats, who dedicated his first volume of collected works to him with the following:

Glory and loveliness have passed away;

For if we wander out in early morn,

No wreathed incense do we see upborne

Into the east, to meet the smiling day:

No crowd of nymphs soft-voiced and young, and gay,

In woven baskets bringing ears of corn,

Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn

The shrine of Flora in her early May.

But there are left delights as high as these,

And I shall ever bless my destiny,

That in a time, when under pleasant trees

Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,

A leafy luxury, seeing I could please

With these poor offerings, a man like thee.

I’d take that over a blue plaque any day of the week.

DT 12 June 2026

*I still have that tattered reprint on my bookshelf, but on my mantel piece you’ll find the two-volume first edition of the collection, published in 1848, acquired from a dealer a few years later.

 **Navigating Cognition: Spatial Codes for Human Thinking Jacob L.S. Bellmund, Peter Gärdenfors, Edvard I. Moser, Christian F. Doeller, Science, Volume 362, 8 November 2018