CONCENTRIC CASTLES AND GUIDE QUALIFICATIONS

A concentric castle - as we learned in guide training - is a castle with a series of defensive walls which can be defended/abandoned as a seige progresses. At the heart of the castle is the keep and there will one or two outer walls to repel attackers. Obviously these walls will be longer and harder to defend the further they are from the keep.

This seems to me to be an apt metaphor for the way we, as qualified London blue badge guides - should guard out guiding privileges. The White Tower (the keep in the Tower of London) for us is our ability and right to guide inside the important sites such as Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral, Windsor Castle and the Tower itself. Unqualified guides are not allowed to guide groups through these places and this was always rigidly enforced at Windsor and westminster Abbey, possibly less so at St Paul's and the Tower - although this is debatable. When you go into oneof these sites you do so under their terms and have to obey the rules about photography, services,line of route, even removing hats in a church. (Only a Christian church, of course - men put on headgear in a synagogue and can leave it on in a mosque.) Guides have to obey these rules and unbadged guides can be legitimately excluded from working there. Canterbury Cathedral does not allow any outside guides onto its premises, which annoys some of us, but that is their policy and we can only grin and bear it.

The next line of defence for London guides worried about guides with lesser qualifications )such as the City of London or City of Westminster badges) is the coach tour panoramic which might include the Changing of the Guard and maybe a photo stop at the Tower or half an hour in St Paul's Crypt. This will also include the classic day trips such as Oxford and Stratford or Stonehenge and Bath - a staple for many London blue badge guides and an important source of income. While it is virtually impossible to exclude non bbgs fromt his work a clear statement of good practice would make it clear that they (we) are the only guides trained for this sort of work and would help to make it standard industry practice to hire only bbgs for this kind of work. After all a panoramic tour of London is not going to stop at Temple Bar, the boundary between the City and Westminster.

The next line of defence is the walking tour, which I think is indefensible in practice. Walking tours are chaotic, anarchic, open season. Anyone frankly can buy a top hat and cloak and advertise Jack the Ripper or Ghost walks for £5 a head. Some of these 'specialist' guides are quite good, others are hopeless but there is no point in trying to abolish them - they will keep cropping up as long as tourists want to see London.

And do we really want to live in a country where a police officer can say to someone; 'You cannot talk to these people because they are not qualified to do so.'? Sounds a bit fascist to me. They do that in Italy, but that is where fascism came from, after all...