Golden Key Academy graduate Justin Manley discusses his experience learning to become a London built environment tour guide

In what ways has the academy transformed your confidence and ability to lead tours?

The Golden Key Academy presents tour guiding as a form of storytelling. I had designed an architectural tour several years before joining the Golden Key Academy, but this course helped me take my tour to the next level by pushing me to think about the message I was trying to convey.

On a practical level the Golden Key gave me the confidence to design and lead a bicycle tour. I am an active cyclist and have commuted around London by bicycle for several years, but the thought of leading a group of bicyclists around the city made me nervous.

Still, I wanted to design a tour of London’s public libraries, and libraries are spread out.

Open City tours manager Adrianna encouraged me to consider designing a bicycle tour, and Golden Key gave me the support I needed to feel confident and provided a marshal on top of my assessor to help me lead my group of fifteen cyclists through central London on a busy Saturday.

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 your tour?

I designed and led a tour of libraries in London from Bloomsbury to Whitechapel. The Connecticut suburb I grew up in had an amazing library which I visited at least once a week through much of my childhood to exchange the just-read for not-yet-read.

The library was a place of freedom and abundance. On a recent visit to my parents’ house, I found in a box of old papers an architectural plan I had drawn around the age of eleven or twelve.

Spread across multiple sheets of printer paper, it shows the layout of a “Great Library,” which I imagined would be the central library for the entire universe, or at least for our galaxy. There was even a marking on the plans (on the floor reserved for staff) to designate the “Statue of the First Librarian,” whom I imagined as a object of reverence for libraries.

All of which is to say: I thought libraries were pretty cool. I left home for university and then moved again for my first job. In each city (Chicago, San Francisco), I was spoiled by library systems which seemed able to provide any book I encountered, no matter how obscure.

Then I moved to London. To my surprise, in this most literary of cities, I was frustrated to find that my local library seldom had the books I wanted to read. I wanted to understand London’s libraries — and what it might take for them to thrive. I also wanted to inspire my tour attendees to look to their local libraries with a sense of excitement and possibility.

In researching the tour, I discovered the vibrancy and dignity many of London’s libraries once possessed — and the efforts some library systems are making today to create inclusive centres of cultural abundance.

The academy offers aspiring tour guides everything they need to deliver successful, insightful and engaging events exploring the built environment. What parts of the course did you find most useful in preparing your tour?

On the first day of Golden Key, Open City chief executive Phineas Harper spoke to us about the formal flexibility of walking tours. I had designed and led a walking tour several years earlier, in Chicago. It was a very conventional tour: walk, stop, talk; walk, stop, talk some more. Phineas gave examples of walking tours where the attendees were blindfolded and tours where they stopped for topical snacks or to sketch what they saw along the way. The tour I ended up designing was very conventional, but Phineas’ introductory talk gave me a sense of possibility and freedom and power that stuck with me throughout the program. There’s so much a walking tour can do.

The most useful part of the course was the series of demo tours, starting with Merlin Fulcher’s semi-impromptu, ‘practicalities of tour guiding’ walk around the Barbican and Jon Wright’s PoMo in the City tour. In these sessions, the guides alternated between talking about the architecture and talking at a meta-level about the tour itself: how they had chosen to include a particular stop, how they decided where to stand and where to position the attendees, how each stop fit into the overall narrative of the tour. These demo tours showed the craft of tour development and tour guiding in action. As I was developing my own tour, I often thought back to the demo tours to remind myself of how to proceed.

What are your words of wisdom for all those signing up for the 2024 course?

If you’re interested in architecture and urbanism and history, the Golden Key Academy is a great way to meet others who share those interests. Come for the demo tour; stay for the conversation with your peers at the pub afterwards!

As the Open House Festival approaches, you can attend your peers’ practice tours and invite them to attend yours. One peer from my cohort attended my practice tour a few weeks before Open House Festival and gave me feedback which helped to refine my tour. I removed one stop, swapped the order of the final two stops, and — most importantly — reworked the narrative tying the stops together and my tour was all the better for it!