After a year of showing London to virtual tourists, Blue Badge guide Sophie Campbell can’t wait to get back to doing the real thing
A couple of weeks ago three people were sitting eating cake in the shadow of a skyscraper in the City of London, listening to the crash and thump of the skateboarders who have colonised its empty spaces during the long months of the pandemic.
Two were Geoff and Ruth, on Ruth’s surprise birthday tour of the City. The other was me, the guide, six feet away with a flask of tea, pushing over carefully wrapped cups and individual packets of cake (awful) made by me to celebrate not only the birthday, but my first tour IRL (for anyone who hasn’t spent the past year online, that means In Real Life) of 2021.
It was my first walk since the Rule of Six came in on March 29. I kept peering at them, thinking “REAL LIVE CLIENTS!” and finding it odd to see legs and feet – as well as heads and shoulders – that weren’t on a screen. I’ve now guided IRL twice, and for all of us I’d say it was intense. Everything looked beautiful but bereft. However, in both quiet Covent Garden and the silent City there were stirrings of life that are increasing by the day in the build-up to May 17.
From then, galleries, churches and palaces across the country will begin to open – and guides may or may not be allowed in. Emails are flying between us and our representative bodies, clarifying how sites, from Westminster Abbey to Bath’s Roman Baths, will be operating. Mostly Rule of Six, it seems, with up to five guests and a guide.
Blue Badge Tourist Guides, like me, hold the only nationally accredited guiding badge and work inside many of the country’s major sites – and, boy, have we missed them. It’s a tough course, a mini version of the cabbies’ Knowledge, and it costs a lot to do.
Guiding in the pandemic has, of course, been different for everyone. Some people have retired, others have taken time out, some, fortuitously, chose last year to have children. The younger ones, already savvy online and on social media, have leapt joyously into the virtual fray. I leapt too, possibly less joyously, just to keep working.
What is the opposite of a key worker? Probably me: I show people my favourite city for a living and write about travel, mainly in the UK. I was lucky to get money from the Chancellor, and I’m aware that many freelancers didn’t.
I’ve used it as best I could to flip my business online while employing – if that doesn’t sound too grand a word for it – as many people as I can. I’ve paid for maps and web design and photography and videography, having realised I just can’t manage to film myself.
The bad news is that having reduced my online shopping to printer ink and the odd dress in 2019, I crashed off the wagon in 2020. Zoom talks in my hopelessly lit flat required a ring light, make up and a green screen – which doesn’t seem to work, so I use it for photographing stuff I’m selling on eBay. I bought a video light and a radio mic and then invested in a stabiliser for my phone, which I use for live camera tours.
Now it’s almost halfway through 2021 and I have a completely different business. The live stuff will always be the Rolls-Royce product, as it will be for most guests. Or so I hope: the serendipity, the weather (not always in a good way), the people around you, the smells, the odd behaviour of people, that’s what always makes travel zing.
But I have two new strings to my bow. The online talks – expansive, infinite in their capacity. Once you’ve negotiated the sourcing of images, you can show pictures, documents, maps, other countries. You can go anywhere to illustrate your subject, and many guides do. Then I’ve got camera tours, which are intense and physically demanding. Work is more variegated: this week a Zoom talk, two camera tours and some writing.
None of this could have happened without technology or without the impetus from vile Covid. For guides, and for people who can’t or won’t travel, it’s opened up the virtual world.
I’ve been scared all year, though. When something goes wrong on Zoom you are so alone, and worse, so visible. I always think of Sandra Bullock in Gravity, dropping her spanner in outer space. For weeks, my image came out sideways on camera walks, to the huge amusement of the viewers, but to my utter mortification (it’s now sorted).
The year overall? Exhausting, stimulating, fascinating. Roll on May 17, when we’ll edge closer to more guiding IRL.