Golden Key Academy graduate Celia Woolfrey discusses her experience learning to become a London built environment tour guide

Why did you apply for the Golden Key Academy and what were you hoping to achieve in terms of personal and professional development?

I felt I was only showing a small part of myself in my work as a writer and I wanted to get off the page and use my voice and performance skills. I had recently left my job at a digital agency because I wanted a bigger life, but wasn’t sure what that looked like. The Golden Key Academy course seemed like a good chance to test how willing I was to leave my comfort zone.

In what ways has the academy transformed your confidence and ability to lead unique and informative tours of urban environments?

It was a privilege to deliver my walk for this year’s Open House Festival – something I never thought I’d be able to do. It shows what you can achieve when you break things down into tiny experiments and bite-size chunks.

People join the Golden Key Academy with a range of personal aims. Was there anything that surprised you most about the course once you started? Did you achieve anything that you hadn’t expected from the Golden Key Academy?

I felt drawn to the Thames and the lost River Walbrook, but I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t until I worked on my tour’s structure and narrative that vague inner feelings were forced into the open. So, it was definitely a case of ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’

That’s probably one of the most useful things I learned on the course – that you don’t necessarily have everything worked out before devising a tour or doing any piece of creative work – the work emerges as you edit and hone and, by the end of the eight-month course, I was much more comfortable with other people witnessing that imperfect, experimental process.

As the months went on, I realised that when you create a tour you are detecting where the emotional current lives – like a dowser. That’s how you and the people on your tour tune in to voices from the past.

Part of the course is developing your own unique tour, exploring a neighbourhood or theme of your choice, to feature in the Open House Festival. What inspired the focus of your special Golden Key Academy tour?

My tour was about rivers, springs and sewers in the City of London. I loved researching Celtic and Roman beliefs about water and ingenious ways throughout the ages of getting a water supply and sanitation into a fast-growing city, right up to Bazalgette’s incredible Victorian sewer system and the Tideway Tunnel today.

I started to see the Thames (and bridges across it) as a phenomenal ally that has looked after Londoners for more 2,000 years as well as being a liminal space bang in the middle of our city. I was reading Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? and realised that the moment a living entity is reclassified from ally to ‘resource,’ the ethical boundary shifts from relationship to extraction.

Standing with a group of 20 people talking about the lost River Walbrook flowing several metres beneath our feet entombed in concrete felt like a quiet act of restoration.

What parts of the course did you find most useful in preparing your tour?

I found that the Saturday sessions at the start of the course with different guest speakers freed up my thinking of ‘what a walking tour could be.’ Those sessions were an invitation to make our tours as playful, creative and radically alive as we wanted them to be.

The mini-tour exercise was also one of the most useful things we did together. It pushed us all to the next level and was a great exercise in collaborating across different working styles and forging strong connections and relationships across the cohort. This proved invaluable in the second half of the course and meant I was able to reach out to other students to practice my tour with.

The public speaking session was excellent – the tutor made it a fun, safe space – and months later I was grateful for what we learned that day as the date for delivering my tour for the Open House Festival got closer and closer. As part of the course you also attend some Open City tours including Benny O’Looney’s Thames boat tours. The ones I went on were really helpful and helped me to see how it should be done!

In what area do you think tour guiding could be the most transformational in the coming years?

Tour guiding is shifting away from transactional ‘walks’ or informational ‘tours’ and transforming into thematic, sideways-looking, entertaining experiences and deep dives into areas of urban life that wouldn’t have been considered tour territory even in relatively recent years.

There is an audience for premium guiding, defined by narrative-driven experiences that throw the spotlight onto how people interact with urban spaces. I love it when people say ‘I’ve walked through this area so many times, but I’ve never noticed this or that or understood why it was there’.

Rather than consuming a string of historical facts, today’s audiences want to slow down and have the chance to look, really look, at what as guides we are pointing out, where it sits in the London story and why that matters. It is about giving people something that teases out possibilities, goes beyond the obvious.

As a booker on a tour it is relaxing and bonding to pause, breathe, connect with others in a group and actively engage with the street-level history of London as well as the people who have lived in, worked in and made our city. So, as guides we are holding that space. ‘Walking tours’ is a legacy, tourism-focused title that completely hides the strategic value of the kind of tours that GKA encourages. We are actively taking people into the landscape and the built environment and providing an experience of community and connection.

A key part of the course is learning together and socialising with a cohort of fellow course participants. What are your words of wisdom for all those signing up for the 2027 course?

Go to everything. Chat with everyone. Our cohort held so much diverse experience between us that it felt like being part of a fun, cohesive tribe. I made some great new friends this year.

You can view Celia’s tour here