Accidental Tours and Illegal Tour Guides: Taking the Textbook out of the Tour

Actually walking through the built environment presents opportunities for the visitor to explore the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships in ways that are not solely dependent on visual observations but on a fusion of haptic indicators – connecting sense with site. Primary, unmediated utterances such as a sideways glance, muffled whisper, double-voiced, gesture, fragment, trace or stumble can problematise didactic interpretations of site and contribute to the formation of latent dialogue about that place. e nature of the tour and the remit of the tour guide can be crucial in determining the exposure of such utterances to the visitor. e nature of exposure is key to determining the mode of engaging a group of participants towards making associative connections on a tour that doesn’t fall into the trap of a self-conscious, artificial set-up (in danger of disenfranchising the ‘uninitiated’). It is important to move beyond the poetic image or a visual concern with spatial aesthetics into an exploration of authoring as dialogue in response to a multitude of haptic references. In this way, the tour that is concerned with active learning could enable participants in the event to be curious, moving through a pervasive scattering of located references.