‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour oe : City Sightseeing tour bus, Windsor (teken 29/07/07). GG3001 Independent Dissertation Candidate 0801566Acknowledgements ‘Thank you to all those who have been involved in the production of this dissertation, particularly my interviewees, for their time, and the staff of Royal Holloway University of London, for their guidance.Contents List of Figures ‘Chapter I: Introduction The Study Research Aims Chapter I: Contextual Literature Review Chapter Il: Methodology The Production of the Tour The Exhibition of the Tour The Consumption of the Tour Research Ethics Chapter IV: Results and Analysis Scripting and Staging Space Consuming Place Chapter V: Conelusion Chapter VI: Bibliography Chapter VI: Appendices Appendix I Appendix IL Appendix Ill Page iff 13 14 15 16 7 18. 18 25 33 35 40 40 47 iiFigure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: Figure 4: Figure S: Figure 6: Figure 7: List of Figures ith marked location of Windsor UK map ity Sighseeing tour bus, Windsor French Brothers tour boat, Windsor Rendez-vous Blue Badge guides, Bobbie and Debbie ‘Making sense of Windsor - the City Sightseeing (2007) route map given to tour passengers [Bounded space of the tour bus enclave Choreographed gazing within the stage-managed space of the tour boat enclave Figure 8: French Brothers (2007) four leaflet: (Re)presenting Windsor from the River Thames Figure 9: Figure 10; Figure 11; Figure 12: Rendez-vous Blue Badge guides ‘dressed-up' to authenticate their ghost walks of Windsor ): The guided walking tour: An example of tourist embodiment in place : Tourist consumption of a ‘pseudo-event’ within the enclavie space of the tour bus : Tourist eonsumptions of Windsor in response to a guide's ‘direction’ Figure 13: Photographie consumptions of Windsor: A performance choreographed by the guide Figure 14: Performing with a camera: ‘The ‘femily gaze’ of Windsor within the tour boat enclave Figure 15: Consuming Windsor through a lens: An improvised photographic performance in the walking tour 19 20 23 23 25 27 28 30 30 31 32. iii6G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Chapter I Introduction “My name is Amanda and I'm a Blue Badge tourist guide!” beams our guide as we all huddle around her, straining to hear above the hustle and bustle surrounding Windsor’s Tourist Information Centre. “What we'll do is about an hours walk around the town, and I’ll show you the castle from the outside,” she declares, drawing our attention fo the dominating structure with a quick point of her finger. “It’s a medieval town, so it'll give you a bit of William Shakespeare and also a Royal mistress, Nell Gwynn”, she says, with an eyebrow raised in mock scandal. “We'll go down to the Long Walk af the back of the castle, which is one of the most beautiful views in England, I don’t know if you've ever been to the back of the castle before?” I join the others in shaking their heads, so as not to isappoint our hostess. “Really beautiful down there”, she continues. We take her word for it and smile politely. “We'll come back into the town via the Guildhall where Prince Charles married Camilla in 2005, and then down the hill fo the river, So, just briefly before we start, a little bit about the town...” Places are intrinsic to tourism (Bserenholdt er al, 2004: 1). All around us there are efforts underway to make places more distinctive and visible in order to provide a sense of pride and belonging, and often this takes the form of ‘heritage? (Cresswell, 2004: 60); the mobilisation of a local past to sell a place in the present for the consumption of tourists. Usually, these articulations of heritage are sold as partial representations of history in discrete, bounded sites (Atkinson, 2005: 141), thus central to the cultural practice of heritage tourism is the (re)presentation of ‘historic places” (adapted from Cloke, 2000: 841); spaces thereby transformed into ‘dramaturgical landscapes” for performing tourism (Berenholat et al, 2004: $1). Tour guides, who constitute a strategic factor in theGG3001 - “Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 representation of a destination area (Dahles, 2002: 783), have therefore entered the spotlight as recognised ‘windows? onto a site, entrusted to encapsulate the essence of place (Pond, 1993: vii). Through their tours, places emerge as ‘tourist places” appropriated, used and made part of the narratives of the guide, hence determining tourism as a thoroughly scripted and staged performance (Beerenholdt ef al, 2004: 50). Tourists are not without agency either, personalising and improvising the master narratives to make them their own (Bruner, 2005: 7). For them, tourism is a way of consuming the world, encountering it, looking at it and making sense of it, thus the performances of tourists also define places as ‘touristic’ (Beerenholdt et al, 2004: 2). This study concems ‘touristic performance’ in the guided tour, whereby tourism functions as “a product relying totally upon simultaneous production and consumption [of tourist places}” (Fletcher, 1998: 168). In short, it examines how tourist places are performed. The Study “Inherent in any tourism activity is the attraction of a destination here, “the concept of destination’ is used for place-marketing, where the contributions of businesses, museums and other attractions are combined in brochures and websites by tourist agencies” (Berenholt ef al, 2004: 13)] with a strong identity” (Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Official Guide, 1994: 85), thus the chosen place for this study is “a traditional British town, inextricably linked with the Royal Family” (Dunn, 1996; Windsor, Berkshire (figure 1). The Visitor and Marketing Manager for the area, Sarah Dunn (1996: 13), claims that ‘the Historic’, ‘the Traditional’, ‘things Royal’ and ‘things, British’ are the sorts of images conjured up by the intemational brand name, ‘Windsor’, thereby emphasising its suitability as a ‘destination’ for investigating the relationship between place and performance in the guided tour.(GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 “Royal Windsor Coty utleamts yoy as it len anlcomed svceensive monarchs ard millions of visitors for basdrtde of i pow hin baad to find letter commendation thar tail” (Official Tourist Guide to the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (1988: 3). The principle focus for visitors to the area is Windsor Castle (Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Official ee Guide, 1994: 85), “the largest - inhabited castle in the world and the favourite weekend home of the Queen” Figure 1: UK map with marked location of Windsor, (Paul Savident, 2007). Crowned by this httpi/ivww nce gov:uk/ProtectedSites/SACselection’s seaspEUCodeUK00125R6 (lat accessed 15/1207). top twenty UK tourist attraction, Windsor has established an “international brand name as a heritage destination second to none” (Dunn, 1996: viii), with tourism worth £444 million annually to the Royal Borough, employing eleven thousand people and welcoming over seven million visitors each year (http:/Avww.visitwindsor.gov.ul/site/home/statictics-and-data (last accessed 21/01/08). A survey devised for visitors of Windsor Castle reveals that nearly eighty percent of respondents planned to see or do something else in the area following their visit to the castle (Windsor Castle Survey, 1995 in Dunn, 1996: 4), yet although there is a great deal to see and much of it within a stone’s throw of the castle, too often these tourists ignore the town itself beyond the nearest restaurant and souvenir shop (Hunter, n.d: 44). The guided tour thus becomes marketable as the “easiest” and “best way” to sce “the most interesting parts of Royal Windsor” (Official Tourist Guide to the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, 1988: 7, emphasis added). This study will therefore shift the(GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor": A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 If and concentrate on a number of guided tours that focus away from the castle i perform Windsor as a place: © City Sightseeing run a tour of Windsor and neighbouring Datchet and Eton on a double-decker, open-topped bus (figure 2), departing every fifteen to sixty minutes, with a guide onboard providing a live commentary. The tour lasts for approximately forty-five minutes and operates a ‘hop on-hop off policy whereby passengers can re-board the bus at any of the eleven stops as often as they would like during the ticket validity period of twenty-four hours. A printed leaflet is included with the ticket, showing the tour route and the locations of the ‘hop on’ and ‘hop off stops. Figure 2: City Sightseeing tour bus, Windsor (taken 08/08/07). ‘© French Brothers offer a forty minute round trip on the River Thames from ‘Windsor to Boveney, departing every half-hour. As well as taking control of the double-decked boat (figure 3), the ‘skipper’ is equipped with a microphone in ‘order to provide a live commentary. Passengers are given a printed leaflet with their tickets giving historical and other information about the river and its surroundings along which they will be cruising.6G3001 - “Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided ‘Tour 0801566 Figure 3: French Brothers tour boat, Windsor, Attps//wwwsakstudentife.com/Travel/Tours/England/Windsor/FrenchBrothersBoat,jpg (last accessed 18/1207), «The Blue Badge Guides of Windsor have qualified with the Southem Tourist Board to obtain the ‘Blue Badge’; the stamp of the highest standard of guiding in the country that renders guides as professionally able to independently lead walking tours in the South East, Windsor Welcome, associated with qualified local guides, run ‘The Royal Windsor Tour’ for an hour around the town. Likewise, Rendez-Vous Blue Badge Guides (figure 4) are professionally qualified to the exacting standards of the Institutes of Tourist Guiding, but choose to run their own scheduled ‘light-hearted’ one hour public tours in Windsor and Eton, as, ell as offering guided commentaries on boat tours of the area. Figure 4: Rendez-vous Blue Badge guides, Bobbie and Debbie, http://www rendezvous. freeuk com/WhoAreWe html (last accessed 17/12/07).Performance in the Guided Tour 080156 (GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Tours Research Aims The objective of this study is to examine how Windsor is performed as a touristie place, To achieve this, the guided tours will be examined at three identifiable, yet inextricably linked, stages of performance: (i The production of the tour: an investigation into the guide's itinerary as a discursive ‘means of (re)presenting the past in a contemporary environment, Iwill examine the construction of the ‘official gaze’ of Windsor, focusing on the role of the guide as ‘playwright’ of tourist space - creating a seript to shape participant understandings of place ~ in order to understand the guide’s intentions of appropriating, re-packaging and delivering Windsor as a tourist product. Gi'The exhibition of the tour: an investigation into the enactment of space by the guide ‘for an audience's consumption. I will examine the ‘staged’ performance of Windsor in the guided tour in motion, focusing on the role of the guide as ‘director’ of a ‘dramaturgical landscape’ - conveying information, offering explanations and delivering narratives of the town — in order to reveal the spatial and social controls that are mobilised to authenticate the tour narrative. Gil) The consumption of the tour: an investigation ino the enactment of space by tourists in relation to how the guide has constructed and (re)presented it. I will examine the tourist consumption of the ‘official’ tourist product performed by the guide, focusing on the role of the tourists as consumers - who may perform their own exclusive narratives - in order to determine the extent to which they allow themselves to be ‘coached’ by the guide into the ‘right sort’ of gazing,6G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Chapter II Contextual Literature Review To be a touri a social role, and like all roles, is not merely occupied but is constructed as it is enacted. This is the same with other roles in tourism, including those of the...guides[....A]Il are constructed roles best studied as a system in interaetion, as a co-production. ‘The metaphor is theatre. (Bruner, 2005: 7) “The production and consumption of tourism are fundamentally ‘geographical’ processes. ‘At their heart are the constructions of and relationships with places and spaces”, claims Crang (1997:143), Ithas been debated, for instance, that “[i}nstead of seeing [tourist] places as relatively fixed entities, to be juxtaposed in analytical terms with more dynamic flows of tourists, image and cultures, we need to see them as fluid and created through performance” (Coleman and Crang, 2002: 1), thus “[tJhe use of performance as a metaphor for tourist practice has become a critical focus of attention...in recent years” (Mordue, 2005: 180). This literature review applies theoretical debates to the issues raised by the research aims, thereby addressing the theatricalisation of the touristic experience. I begin by examining the performative practices of the tour guide to determine their roles as playwrights, directors and choreographers in the ‘stage- management? of bounded tourist spaces (Bexrenholdt et al, 2004: 51). The performative constraints and opportunities thus believed to arise from the scripted tour narrative are then related to tourist consumptions of the ‘staged’ product in order to consider how they themselves can be conceived as performers in tourist space (Edensor, 1998: 7). ‘The primary aim of this chapter therefore becomes to theoretically examine the dramaturgical performances of tourism in the produetion and consumption of tourist places.GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 “A tour guide, in its purest industry definition, is ‘one who conducts a tour," or one with ‘a broad-based knowledge of a particular area whose primary duty is to inform’ (Pond, 1993: 17), yet their expected role arguably extends well beyond merely welcoming and informing visitors (Pond, 1993: vii). “Tourism based on cultural heritage in particular, demands a specific body of knowledge and a high standard of tourist guiding” (Dahles, 2002: 783), requiring a guide who will “involve their tour participants, personalise and enliven stories of the people, communicate excitement and enthusiasm for the historic resource and enhance the visitor’s experience” (Peterson, 1994: 247). “{GJuides are of 3g, glossing, and interpreting sites”, hence the role of tour guides in narrating touristic space has become a recent research theme (Dahles, 2002: 783-784). By 1985, Erik Cohen had described “a typology of the dynamics of the role of tour guiding based on two historical crucial importance in [this realm of] tourism as theirs is the task of sele types of guide: the [original] ‘pathfinder’ and the [professional] ‘mentor”” (Cohen et al, 2002: 919) —pathfinders, on one hand, being geographical guides who lead the way through an environment in which tourists lack orientation or through a socially defined territory to which they have no access, restricting themselves to pointing out the route and the attractions without offering elaborate explanations (Dahles, 2002: 786), and mentors, on the other hand, being guides who “select the ‘objects of interest” in accordance with their own personal preferences or tastes, their professional training, directions received from their employer or the authorities, or the assumed interest of their party” (Cohen, 1985: 14), In the twenty-plus years since Cohen’s (1985) article was published, however, tourism has become the world’s biggest industry, having overtaken petroleum and motor vehicles as the leading export camer in the world in 1994 (Cloke, 2000: 841), therefore it is the mentor whom has gained significance in recent years as “{tJour guides have had to become more professionalized and highly trained”; “the guide is no longer a pathfinder, tending to the camp and reading the trail markers” (Cohen ef al, 2002: 920), but a trained performer of the tourist product — hence one reason why work associated with the service sector is often described as ‘performative labour’ (Wilbert and Hansen 2005: 5).6G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Crang (1997; 140-141) draws attention to the performative understandings of tourism employment in insisting that a “dramaturgical discourse” becomes pre-eminent in the cultural (re)construction of the workplace as stage, whereby recruited guides have to be “directed? into their ‘roles? In the coaching of the ‘right kind” of ‘service-orientated people’, he claims, there is an “[e]mphasis...placed...in the surface acting skills of communicational interaction”, through which the "surface managements of the body- eye contact, smiling, open gestures, etc.- are established through forms of ‘emotional management? such that they stem from states of feeling[:] “I smile because I really am pleased to see you". In further communicating these dramaturgical understandings of tourism practices, it has been suggested that employees will wear ‘costumes’ under the belief that [a] person who is not dressed for the part will not be able to play that part effectively” (Solomon, 1985: 69), “[T]rained to enact roles that fit in with their institutional setting and express attributes such as deference, eagerness to please and friendliness”, these “cast members” are “required to wear outfits and expressions that are harmonized with themed environments” (Edensor, 1999: 324), thus tourist spaces becomes synomenous of a ‘set’, wherein “[m|anaging the elements of the physical environment of the service organisation is one means to characterise services and, in addition, to affect the way in which they are delivered and perceived” (Upah and Fulton, 1985: 255). ‘The metaphor of the theatre hence seems an appropriate way of grasping tourism performances” (Baerenholdt et al, 2004: 5). \clude notions about the direction of “[A]n extension of tourism theatrical metaphors t¢ performances, the stage-management of space and the choreographing of movement also helps to reveal the spatial and social controls that are mobilized to assist performance”, claims Edensor (1999: 326, original emphasis). It is his belief that “directors are most evident in organized tours where tour guides and managers suggest places for photographing and gazing performances, and provide scripted commentary. They are also instrumental in choreographing the movements of tourists, chaperoning them along prescribed paths, and restraining party members who stray from assigned routes” (Edensor, 1999; 326). Although the impossibility of portraying the whole of history in the restricted time-span of the guided tour is widely acknowledged (Balll ef al, 2005 : 4), heritage walks in particular have been criticised as a form of interpretation for their “sitesGG3001 - “Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 and monuments” approach (Markwell ef al, 2004: 467), in favouring “those elements that society values... wants to remember and feels proud about, most notably “the visible legacies of the wealthy and powerful” (Timothy and Boyd, 2003: 237). The established narratives of urban trails can therefore be related Bruner’s (2005: 4) exemplar of the “master narrative” as a metaphorical umbrella whereby “sunlight filters through the umbrella and shines only on some aspects of...culture and darkens the rest” to emphasise that “[tJhose darkened parts which do not fit the master narrative are blocked out and are ignored or disregarded”. ‘A question of authenticity surrounding the tourist product thus arises from the notion of the narrative as “a perceptual framework that works as a filter which excludes as much as it includes” (Bruner, 2005: 4). Relevant to this debate is the concept of ‘staged authenticity’, a term first employed by Dean MacCannell (1973), using Goffiman’s (1959) theatrical metaphors of “front” and ‘back? regions, to “describe the process by which tourists are prevented ftom seeing the ‘back’ region (of real, ‘authentic’ life) by steering towards a ‘front’ region of interaction between hosts and guests, where authenticity is ‘staged’ for commercial advantage” (Ball ef ai, 2005 : 4); a “strategic ‘stage ‘management’ of impressions [that] characterizes the ways in which [guides] attempt to convey particular meanings and values in social settings on the ‘front stage’, dropping the actor's mask only when they reach the domestic safety of ‘backstage regions” (Edensor, 1999: 323). However, “[ilt is always possible that what is taken to be entry into a back region is really an entry into a front region that has been totally set up in advance for touristic visitation” (MaeCannell, 1973: 597), thus enforcing the notion that backstages are ‘staged’ in a “contrived and artificial manner” (Urry, 2002: 9). While this “very idea of ‘staging’ performances for tourists implies substituting for the authentic experience” (Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, 2005: 1), MacCannelt (1973: 595) claims that such an “aura of superficiality...is not always perceived as such by the tourist, who is usually forgiving about these matters”, Bruner (2005: 9) has hence critiqued MacCannell (1973) for dismissing the “questioning gaze” of the tourists through suggesting that tourists have an “undefined puzzlement about the authenticity and credibility of what they are seeing” - instead of being passively consumed experiences, “rather more 10GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 complex and subtle processes are at work in these [tours] in which audiences...negotiate meanings” (Wilbert and Hansen, 2005: 6). Ithas hence been determined that “[t]he consumption of tourist places will depend on the varying ‘gaze’ (Urry, 1990) of the tourist, who as a receiver of the signs and symbols of produced tourist culture is not necessarily structured by those signs, but can destroy the realities of tourist places and practices in the free play of the imagination (MacCannell, 1973)” (Cloke, 2000: 842). John Urry (2002: 10), who first coined the term ‘tourist gaze’, believes that “[pleople have to learn how, when and where to ‘gaze™, exemplified in the guided tour through the manifestation of narrative devices and strategies, such as ) that tell a structured story through the engagement of the visual sense (Markwell et al, showing pictures and maps, and reconstructing historical constructs (Hurtado, 200: 2004: 460). A performative understanding of tourist practices, however, demands a more embodied perspective (Coleman and Crang, 2002), thus Umy’s (2002) ‘gaze’, which confines the touristic experience to sight, has been criticised as being too “simplistic” (Franklin, 2003: 70) for ignoring the embodied presence of tourists in place - “their modes of engagement, their conversations, their surprise, delights, sadnesses and angers”. ‘After all, tourists “are not merely absorbing signs from these objects and making sense of them through socially constructed narratives”, claims Franklin (2003: 206), “but being interpellated directly to them through their life histories and experience”. It is arguably “more important [therefore] to allow people to ‘create’ their own authentic experience...and accept that authenticity is both relative and subjective when reduced to a personal Jevel” (Timothy and Boyd, 2003: 255) where “imaginations are a part of the experience as much as anything else” (Crang, 1994: 346), MacCannell (2001: 36) therefore “offers the term ‘second gaze’ to...underline the agency of tourists in the face of attempts to order and manage the ‘gaze’” (Franklin, 2006: 206), whereby “tourists...‘ad-lib’ — wandering away from the scripts that they have been given...playfully re-composting] the scripts of history visions of the world” (Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, 2005: 2). Far from Unry’s distanced gaze of a manufactured spectacle, the tourists themselves become actors in the theatre of the tour (Edensor, 1999: 340), and it is through their embodied to] reflect more personalised TT6G3001 - “Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 performances that “{hleritage sites are constructed by the people who come to see them” (Franklin, 2003: 205-206). ‘The making of places through performance is thus seen as central to this study (Berenholdt ef al, 2004: 5). Whilst “[an} analysis of how the tourism production system markets and packages place is a lesson on the political economy of the social construction of ‘reality’ and social construction of place (Britton, 1991; 474), it implies that “performances are enacted for tourists, and that the only people on stage are tourism workers” (Edensor, 1999: 324, original emphasi . Tt needs to be emphasised that although ‘performance’ may well imply the presence of an audience, there is no necessity for this audience to be entirely passive (Ball et al, 2005: 6); performance, in fact, “involves a relationship between performer and audience in which a liminal space, however slight, is opened up. The performer-audience interaction occurs within, or represents, critical areas in which a society is self-reflexive; it provides a kind of window, a ‘limited area of transparency’” (Tumer, 1982 in Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998: 40) through which an examination of touristic performance is possible. This study aims to understand a ‘tourism in motion” in order to steer away from the static representations of place offered by the guidebook and thus understand the social practices involved in place performance, Rather than taking the form of foundational studies in the ‘geography of tourism whereby locational analysis of tourist flows and movements have ‘been used to model the evolution of particular tourist resorts, I intend to see places and practices of tourism as integrally interconnected in the production, representation and consumption of tourist places, contributing to the theoretical understandings of Erik Cohen, Dean MacCannell and John Urry, in particular (adapted from Cloke, 2000: 841). 12GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 801566 Chapter III Methodology Increasingly, researchers are deploying a ‘triangulation’ of methods approach (Valentine, 2001: 45) whereby both quantitative and qualitative measures are embraced in order to maximise data collection for a more extensive study (Dwyer and Limb, 2001: 6). However, having undertaken a pilot questionnaire as a qualitative approach to pre-test consumer interpretations of Windsor as a (re)constructed tourist product, it became clear that due to the highly individualised nature of participant understandings, tourists should not be objectively conceptualised as “rational actors” (Clifford and Valentine, 2003: 3) through the application of such a “reductive” quantitative method (Hine, 2000: 42). The study instead demands qualitative methodologies that are intended to explore the feelings, understandings and knowledges of research subjects under the humanistic assumption that human behaviour is, in fact, subjective (Clifford and Valentine, 2003: 3). In order to enable this acquisition of “insider-knowledge” Eyles and Smith, 1988: 2), u “lived experience” of the guided tours was necessitated through an “autoethnography” (Hoggart et al, 2002: 251), whereby I adopted an active role as tour participant across a spectrum of guided tours. Rather than focusing on one single guided tour of Windsor, the field- based ethnographic research focused on three tours, each with a distinct methodology of guiding - by bus, by boat or on-foot, in order to more fully understand performative practices of tourism across a diverse cross-section of the town’s touristic space. Furthermore, the research was carried out from July to September 2007, coinciding with Windsor collection of data than could have been achieved during the off-peak period. most popular season for guided tours, thereby allowing for a much ‘richer! 13663001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 The production of the tour It was necessary to have wide-ranging discussions with tour staff in order to thoroughly discuss their guiding itineraries, thus semi-structured interviews, conducted in person, were adopted as a qualitative form of “conversation[s] with a purpose” (Eyles, 1998 in Valentine, 2005: 111) to allow fora fluid form of data collection whereby interviewees could explain the (re)presentation of Windsor in their construction of an ‘official gaze’, ‘This methodology had the advantage of raising issues that I had not anticipated (Valentine, 2005; 111), hence producing ‘a deeper pioture’ (Silverman, 1993: 15 in ‘Valentine, 2005: 111) than would have been obtainable from conducting a questionnaire survey with limited explanatory power. ‘A forty-five minute formal interview intended to examine the appropriation of Windsor as a touristic place was therefore conducted with Vee Emery, the Guide Supervisor for City Sightseeing, whose position as ‘gatekeeper’ (an individual in an organisation that has the power to grant access to people or situations for the purposes of research (Burgess, 1984: 48)) had identified her as a potential research subject. Due to her senior position at me with a free bus boarding pass for the City Sightseeing, she had the authority to equi period of data collection and the ability to ‘snowball’ potential research subjects in directing me to a selection of her trained guides for interviewing. As I am aware from previous studies that the gatekeeper may steer the researcher away from certain potential contacts in order to prevent a dissenting voice from being heard (Valentine, 2001: 116- 117), T would like to insi this manner as the option was given to interview any of the City Sightseeing guides. From Vee" with the ‘top guide’ of City Sightseeing, Jamie Read, wherefore I could explore the pre~ that the research collected is unlikely to have been distorted in recommendation, therefore, a twenty-five minute formal interview was conducted determined social and spatial controls mobilised by a guide to (re)present ‘Windsor’ as an ‘authentic’ tourist product for a consumer audience. A thirty minute formal interview conducted with Jacqui Kjaersgaard, the tour manager of Windsor Welcome and a snowball contact from a member of staff at Windsor’s Tourist Information Centre whom passed on the details of companies running guided walking 4(GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor": A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566, tours in the area, allowed for an examination into the construction of the guided narrative for which Windsor had been ‘officially written’. Another such forwarded contact was Bobbie Latter, a tour guide on both walking and boat tours of Windsor, with whom a one-hour formal interview was conducted to allow for an insight into a guide's reason for constructing and (fe)presenting the past within a regulated space. Having arranged an interview with Don (no surname given), Manager of French Brothers, that never came to fruition due to his commitments during the peak tourism period, he did respond via e-mail to a few questions on an interview schedule that had been sent to him in preparation for a formal interview. ‘The research collected was therefore not as ‘in-depth’ as had been obtainable from previous respondents as Don could not be prompted to elaborate on an answer, but his responses could be used alongside the historical information on a leaflet given to passengers boarding the boat in order to determine the ‘oflicial’ gaze of Windsor from the perspective of the River ‘Thames. Although his authoritative position within the company rendered him a potential gatekeeper, Don expressed a wish that his ‘skippers’ were not to be distracted from their jobs by my research collection, thus an ethical decision was made not to interview staff of French Brothers. The Exhibition of the Tour ‘Asan ethnographer trying to understand a guide’s enactment of space in a tour in motion, I deemed participant observation as a suitable methodology to gain first-hand experience of performance. Although I am aware that ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ roles in participatory and observational research have been classified (see Junker, 1960), I find that these terms in isolation are too simple to describe my role as researcher; in practice I moved between these roles as my research progressed - talking to, working with, and watching the activities of the guides (Cook, 2005: 175). Having been given Vee’s business card as a “bus pass’, for instance, I felt obliged to explain to the guide onboard the purpose of my research; hence he or she was implicit in the knowledge of my presence on tour as researcher to thus determine my role as overt. However, my preference to be viewed as a tourist by the guide in order to ‘authenticate’ my experience of the tour therefore meant, 15GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor": A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 that the guides of the boat and walking tours were not informed of my role as researcher to allow for covert participation and observational roles. ‘Through tour participation, the guides were recorded using a dictaphone in order to later allow for a close-reading of the narrative transcripts in the examination of the stage-management of space, In observing , I recorded field notes on the dramaturgical the non-auditory aspects of tour gui strategies employed by the guide in performing place to an audience. The Consumption of the Tour Originally intended to be investigated through a ‘mixing methods’ approach (Sporton, 1999 in Valentine, 2005: 112) whereby questionnaires were to be used alongside qualitative methodologies, I instead opted to use qualitative methodologies that do not rely on priori hypotheses that treat tourists as a homogenous group to thereby allow for a greater depth of description of individualised tourist consumptions (adapted from Hine, 2000: 42), Not feeling out of place with a notebook amongst history enthusiasts, I therefore felt at ease in covertly observing tourist behaviours on the tours in order to investigate the extent to which they allowed themselves to be ‘choreographed’ by the guide; mapping their movements in my fieldnotes and their actions in accordance to the guided narrative for evidence of improvised tourist performances. Having carried out participant observation on the consumption(s) of Windsor, | intended fo conduct informal interviews with tour participants in order to examine individual perceptions of Windsor indicative of improvised tourist performances that transgressed the discursive blueprint of a guide’s narrative (Beerenholdt ef al, 2004: 53). The research derived from these interviews was not deemed to be representative of a sample population, thus when choosing respondents there was no bias to be had, for example, towards a tourist’s age or gender - variables that may have been determinative of a sampling population when undertaking questionnaires quantifying tourist perceptions. Interviews were therefore conducted with tourists for each type of tour, lasting between fen and thirty minutes, all of which were recorded with a dictaphone to later provide a transcript for analysis, and with the respondents’ consents in order to ensure that I was acting ethically. 16GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor": A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Research Ethics Behaving ethnically in geographicel research, which requires that a researcher conducts themselves morally (Mitchell and Draper, 1982 in Hay, 2003: 37), can be viewed as a politically correct add-on rather than anything that is intrinsic to the design of a research project, but in practice these moral questions actually underpin what researchers do. ‘The ethical dilemmas of participation, consent, confidentiality, and giving something back to respondents, were therefore a carefully considered issue at the heart of my research design: 1 gave informants the option of opting into my research rather than putting them in the uncomfortable situation of having to refuse me that arises from phrasing ‘my request in a way that implies I assume a ‘yes’ answer. ‘© I gained the consent of those to whom | talked in order to ensure that the respondents knew what they were committing themselves to and that I had the necessary permission to use the research collected by the study. + Having become aware that confidentiality is a “particularly thorny issue”, 1 offered to give my interviewees pseudonyms in the presentation of this study in order to safeguard their personal information. ‘© Finally, under the recognition that researchers usually ask respondents to give something (such as their time and experiences) for nothing, I offered respondents a brief outline report summarising the key results of this study. Furthermore, as Vee was looking to recruit staff for City Sightseeing, she offered to employ me as a tour guide for the following season. I see this as an opportunity to ‘give something back’ to the research participants, both the guides and future tourists of Windsor. (adapted fom Valentine, 2001: 49-50). 7(GG3001 - “Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Chapter IV Results and Analysis ‘The integral interconnections between the production, exhibition and consumption of the guided tour result in the sub-division of this chapter into two sections for analysis - ‘Scripting and Staging Space’; an examination of the performative practices of the tour ‘guide in the (re)presentation of Windsor, and ‘Consuming Place’; a study of tourist performances in their consumption of the staged touristic product. Scripting and Staging Space ‘The ‘playwrights’ of the tours create a ‘script’ for guiding that acts as a “discursive blueprint” to shape participant understandings of place. They ‘edit’ tourist spaces into ““dramaturgical landscapes” for performing tourism Barenholdt ef al, 2004: 51, 53) to thus ‘stage” Windsor “with the greatest care...programm[ing their performance] to the nth degree” (Lefevbre, 1991: 59) in order to coach the tourist into the ‘right sort” of gazing: { ‘They [the guides} have, if you like - let’s use the word ‘script’ ...a pattern of what they have to say and where they have to say it...[ WJhile the bus is here [in front of us]...she [the guide] will be saying obviously about the castle... what they [the tourists} can see from this point...And then as the bus moves off... {the guide] talks about that statue...the street, the Guildhall - it’s all about what can be seen.” Interview with Vee Emery, 09/08/07. Tin directing the tour, ‘Zook fo the left’, ‘now on your right’ and ‘look ahead to see...’ are “directions? utilised by professional guides to choreograph tourists? movements and thus subject them to some form of ‘quality control’ whereby trained staff, tutored to perform to tourists in an ‘appropriate manner’ (see Appendix I, pp.40-41), organise tourist spaces in a way that ‘purifies? the touristic experience to make clear an otherwise alien environment (figure 5). Furthermore, City Sightseeing staff tactically direct tourists to 18GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor": A Study of Touristic Performanes the Guided Tour 0801566 the ‘most interesting? features of the town whilst wearing a standardised uniform that serves as a means of “aesthetic policing” to make thematic an unfamiliar ‘otherness’ and ‘thus separate tourists from the ‘realities’ of place. These guided tours are therefore 5, 52) whereby a physical environment is ‘stage-managed’ within a bounded space (figure 6) to format “a typified by their “enclavic character” (Edensor, 1998: customised excursion” (Craik, 1995: 6); a replicated commodified space that allows a guide as ‘mentor’ to maximise tourist consumptions through ‘watering’ accordingly a landscape objectified by a collective perspective: “You've got a sort of big encyclopaedia sitting inside your head, and you just reach in and grab the bits out of it that you think you need while you're looking at the people's reactions, Oh, we'll have a little bit more of that; we'll add a bit more vinegar... That’s how it works.” Interview with Bobbie Latter, 17/08/07. Figure 5: Making sense of Windsor - the City Sightseeing (2007) route map given to tour passengers 190G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor": A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 9801566 Figure 6; Bounded space of the tour bus enclave (taken 18/08/07). ‘The efficacy of the guide’s performance therefore relies upon the ability of the audience to share the meaning the actor hopes to transmit; after all, the effect of their performance is contingent upon an audience that understands the message. ‘Tourists thus act as a social control on the tour narrative, adding a pressure that is particularly stringent for a guide when performing to shape a group understanding of place (Edensor, 1999: 327). A guide’s degree of awareness regarding individualised tourist performances, however, is determinably less reflexive; Vee, for example, discourages her guide’s from getting involved in ‘one-to-ones’ with a passenger in order to maximise a group performance. Guides often do not respond to improvised tourist performances that go against the ‘direction’ of a ridged narrative, therefore, but instead homogenise tourist expectations to deliver a place to a collective audience: ‘You have a basic tour...then judge your audience to decide what to elaborate on...1fa _group has a particular interest, you [the guide] concentrate on that...,The WI Indies, for instance, don’t want deep history, just ‘bits and bobs’. Interview with Jacqui Kjaersgaard, 22/08/07, emphasis added. 20the Guided Tour 0801566 GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performanes The strategic stage-management of a tourist space scripted to collectively shape participant understandings is implicated by the motion of the tour, demonstrated most, obviously through the selective historical portrait of the town narrated in the bus tour, whereby sites are (re)presented in a fragmented commentary of space that tourists are travelling through. The fluidity of the tour thus means that timing becomes of crucial importance to a guide’s performance — under the notion that the tourist enclave is designed for the visual above all else, there is little point in the guide talking about, something the tourists have just gone past. With a general guideline to follow (see “Appendix I, pp. 42-43), guides are therefore encouraged to vary their scripts depending on what is “on display’ to the tourists in the exhibition of the tour: ‘As long as guides have got the actual spine of it (the relevant facts]...they can digress abit...1 always say to them... [if] there’s a beautiful wedding at the church...don’t ignore it! - that’s called ‘sensitivity’, right? Break offfand say, “Oh! Look at this beautiful whatever!”...Make a thing out of it. Interview with Vee Emery, 09/08/07. Places thus act as ‘spatial triggers’ shaping a guide’s performance; visible objects that are of no relevance to the guide’s intended script but nonetheless influence the content of their narrative. Although the guides’ itineraries are implemented to direct tourists along “predetermined routes of consumption” (Miles, 1998: 147), the tourists” detachment from ‘a landscape moving before their eyes means that the guide can easily ‘improvise’ a narrative to avert tourist attentions when the bus is moving quickly, through making loose links between the material object gazed upon and stories told that have no direct, relevance to Windsor: “[W]e’re coming to...a world famous teddy bear shop...which reminds me of a story that happened Jast year;...there’s a collection of very valuable teddy bears down in Dorset... They got a Doberman...to protect the teddy bears...a stupid idea if you know dogs and how they react to fluffy toys. Apparently it ate the teddy bear that used to belong to Elvis Presley, and it lost its job after that!” -City Sightseeing tour transcript, 05/08/07. 216G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566, The effect of this ‘story-telling’ is to thus diminish “the capacity for tourists romantically fo consume places at leisure” (Kracauer, 1995 in Edensor, 1998: 50) in choreographing the gaze inwardly on the guide. However, there are instances that when viewed from a distance on the River Thames, the intrusions of contemporary tales have less of an effect, on the guide’s narrative; the detachment of the narrator from the landscape, when coupled with the leisurely pace of the vessel, enables a greater unravelling of local history via boat than is allowed for by the velocity of the tour bus: “On our left-hand side...in the 60s... there used to be a famous nightclub on this site...known as the Ricky Tick Club...[it] featured such groups as “The Who’ and lowever...in around “The Beatles* [more information on the history of the club] 1970 [sets the scene]...{it] succumbed to a serious fire, and was never rebuilt. Hence Windsor Leisure Centre now stands on the site.” -French Brothers tout transcript, 05/08/07. ‘As always within the discourse of tour guiding, the coverage of space in the boat tour remains highly selective and is concerned with the visual consumption of particular sites ‘detached? from the tourists and framed by the guide within a ‘policed’ enclavie space where bodily movement is highly choreographed (figure 7). Don, Manager of French Brothers, emphasises that “skippers must comment on clearly visible landmark features ‘from the River Thames, induced with a little local history {as is demonstrated on the leaflet handed to passengers (figure 8)]” (24/09/07). A “sceneography” (Gottdiener, 1997; 73) is therefore constructed by the gui particular attractions, reducing “visual and functional forms to a few key images” (Rojek, in order to direct the participant’s gaze to 1995; 62) to fit their narrative of a bounded tourist space: “Try not to talk to them [the audience] in such a way as to tell them too much about things they can't see, unless it’s relevant to the story that you're telling, ..Don’t go dangling any carrots...[to] disappoint people unnecessarily.” -Interview with Bobbie Latter, 17/08/07. 26G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Figure 8: French Brothers (2007) tour leaflet: (Re)presenting Windsor from the River ThamesGG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Unlike the bus and boat tours, the walking tour is promoted as ‘on-foot discovery” thus is determinably less bounded in space - it may even be related to ‘pathfinding? in heterogeneous space whereby “the options of [tourist] movement through a labyrinthine structure [of the streets] provide opportunities for diverse walking performances and close encounters...[with] haphazard features and events [that can] disorder the tou gaze ” (Edensor, 1999: 331, 340), but nonetheless, these tours are by their nature group- orientated, and tourist movements are choreographed en-masse by the guide to minimise individual spatial exploration: Our guide is marching ahead of us, umbrella in the air so that we don’t lose her. We pass a car in the street that is causing a stir as it comically appears to be making movements without a driver. People in our group stop and take pictures. When the ‘guide hears the laughter, she turns round to realise that she we are dwindling. “I'd move away quickly, if Twere you”, she insists, “It's probably a wind-up being filmed for TV. Follow me!” -The Royal Windsor Tour fieldnotes, 29/07/07. It becomes clear, therefore, that in between pausing at sites for the guide to disperse information about what can be seen and for photographs to be taken, the brisk march of the tour guide is a tempo to be adopted by the tour participant, constituting what Edensor (1998: 50) describes as “a segmented stop-start collective performance” in which a ‘pathfinder-come-mentor’ guide has the leading role of ‘acting out” touristic space to thereby ‘stage-manage’ a tourist product, ‘Through doing so, the tourists’ regular and routinised patterns in space bear a particular familiarity to regularised ‘place ballets” (Seamon, 1979 in Edensor, 1999: 339) whereby the tourist body moves in accordance with the directions suggested by the guides and set design. 24GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Consuming Place As ‘live actors’ (Tivers, 2002: 187), guides have the desire to ‘stage’ an atmosphere in order to ‘authenticate’ their performance; Bobbie Latter of Rendez-Vous Guides and her tour guide colleagues dress in ‘spooky’ outfits for performing their ‘Ghosts of Windsor’ tour to an audience (figure 9). ‘Dressing up’ to guide a themed tour is an acknowledged technique amongst guides as a means of staged place interpretation for tourists: “ get the guides to dress up for our ‘Medieval Walks’. You think of a character from that era...to set the scene...It makes the tour more authentic, which is what we must do to make the tour experience ‘realistic’ for paying consumers.” -Interview with Jacqui Kjaersgaard, 22/08/07. Figure 9: Rendez-vous Blue Badge guides ‘dressed-up’ to authenticate their ghost -waiks of Windsor, http://www zendezvous freeuk-com/Ghost html (last accessed 17/12/07) In their quest to further ‘make real’ the touristic experience, guides do attempt to take le of Windsor Welcome led us to the back of tourists ‘off the beaten track’; one gi Windsor Castle, a place she excitedly told us that few people knew how to get to, despite this area being open to the public since the early 1800s. City Sightseeing buses pass these “back gates’ to the castle from the road and their passengers are told to gaze upon the 25Performance in the Guided Tour 080156 GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Tour entrance used exclusively by castle ‘insiders’, including The Queen herself. Although 1 did notice the surprise of some tourists in ‘discovering’ these ‘hidden’ spaces, it would be unrealistic to generalise that all tour participants are duped into accepting the artificiality of such a staged production: “Oh, please, spare me the ‘this is the secret location’ rubbish! The Long Walk fat the back of the castle] is signposted for goodness’ sake! I know...what’s what. And 1 know when the guide is [in a sarcastic tone] “authenticating” her “Windsor is a really Royal town” spiel. Take what they say with a ‘pinch of salt’...But at Jeast you [the tourist] can say you've ‘officially done Windsor’ [Jaughs].” -Interview with Windsor Welcome tour participant, 29/07/07. ‘A ‘questioning gaze’ does exist, therefore, that quashes the guide's attempts of touring under the guise of a ‘pathfinder’ to mask a “front stage’ as an authentic “back stage”. ‘The contextualisation of space on the ground that ‘makes real’ a guide’s staging of ‘reality’ in the walking tour in fact encourages an embodied sense of place for the tourist that thus enables dem to (reconstruct these formally ‘written’ spaces. The staged tourist gaze thus becomes ‘negotiable’ from the tourists’ positioning in place (figure 10). As Cresswell (2006: 213) makes clear, “walking creates ‘shadows and ambiguities” in even the most strictly ordered space”, hence through walking space becomes a “practiced place” (de Certeau, 1984: 117) transformed by the embodiment of tourists whom thereby become “characters” on an urban stage” (de Certeau and Giard, 1998: 135), instrumental in creating “spatial stories” (de Certeau, 1984: 115) of their own; a ‘tactic’ used by toutists to undermine the guide’s ‘strategies’ of Windsor’s (representation (de Certeau, 1984: xix): ‘While our guide is talking about the origins of the street name in which we are standing, a husband is discussing with his wife where they will go for lunch. A ‘woman steps away from our crowd and tums her back on the group to capture an image of the castle, All whilst the guide carries on narrating regardless, -The Royal Windsor Tour fieldnotes, 12/08/07. 266G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Figure 10; The guided walking tour: An example of tourist embodiment i place (taken 19/08/07). ‘An individualised experience of a tourist is thus permitted by a sensitised consumption of heterogeneous space, enforcing the notion that tourists on heritage walks are far more ‘sensorialy complex and emotion laden’ (McIntosh and Prentice, 1999: 609) than previous studies have realised (most notably, Urry’s (2002) ‘The Tourist Gaze”). Unlike the ‘stop-start? nature of the walking tour that gives rise to these unbounded consumptions, the bus tour moves fluidly past the landscape, meaning that tourists cannot inhabit the space directly unless they choose to ‘hop-off at one of the eleven bus stops where there is no guide to choreograph their movements. ‘Thus, tourists do not experience ‘reality’ directly, but thrive on ‘pseudo-events? (Urry, 2002: 7); “an elaborately contrived indirect experience” offered by “air-conditioned comfort views...through a picture window [(figure 11)]” (Boorstin, 1961: 99). Through such a contrived experience, the body loses its materiality; hence the ‘gaze’ becomes the dominant form of place consumption, whereby the guide as mentor provides a constant narrative that directs a vis al ‘gaze’ to the space that tourists are travelling through, thus separating them off from everyday experience (Urry, 2002: 3). 2GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Figure 11: Tourist consumption ofa ‘pseudo-event” within the enclavie space of the tour bus (Gaken 18/08/07). Many of the tourist performances occurring within the enclavic-natured “theatres* of the bus and boat guided tours are themselves a staged product of the guide's narrative. “Interaction is really important to make the tour feel personal - otherwise the passengers just ‘cone out™, says Jamie Read (14/08/07), a guide of City Sightseeing. The tourist performances that Jamie encourages through performer-audience interaction are therefore collectively enacted within a framework disciplined by an authoritative body: “Til try and get...[the audience] involved. ..usually [in] a ghost story that I tell about The Royal Stag Inn...I get the passengers to make scary ghost noises for the story, and sometimes get a bit of competition going between the upper and lower decks! Interview with Jamie Read, 14/08/07. 286G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Furthermore, there is evidence that tourists suffer from a social drama whereby their internal surveillance by the guides and fellow participants within the tour serves as a disciplinary gaze to underscore communal conventions about ‘appropriate’ ways of performing (Edensor, 1999: 327). In the boat tour, the guide is steering the vessel and therefore has his back turned to the audience, thus by implication the tourists are addressed as a collective whole. Likewise, itis easier for a guide of the bus tour to address a group audience as he will be sitting down for the duration of the tour under strict health and safety regulations and therefore cannot see his entire audience, A ourist’s measure of self-monitoring is hence greater in the walking tour where he or she will feel more ‘involved? due to a stronger communal solidarity arising from the small size of the group: [WHith a bus tour... you can go unnoticed....chat to friends, bounce the kids on your lap. But on this walking one, because of the small group, you feel obliged not to ‘switch off, After all, who wants an angry guide? And I'm sure the guide doesn’t ‘want ‘lazy tourists’!” Interview with Windsor Welcome tour participant, 19/08/07. A prime example of tour participants pressured into following the disciplined choreography of the guide in any tour is manifested through their compliance with the practice of highly directed and sequentialised looking (Bennett, 1995: 186-187) (figure 12); a ‘direction’ most notably performed in taking pictures of recommended “best views" of Windsor as a means of interpreting a commodified space in response to a dominant ‘gaze constructed by the guide (figure 13). In one guided bus tour, the guide even counted down the seconds to the moment when a ‘fantastic shot’ of the castle could be captured, encouraging tourists to stand up as the bus slowed down in their fanaticism to obtain a picture (see Appendix Il, pp. 44-46, for examples of tourist performances in relation to a guide’s ‘directions’ for each type of guided tour). 29GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Figure 12: Tourist consumptions of Windsor in response to a guide's ‘direction’ (taken 05/08/07). Figure 13; Photographic consumptions of Windsor: A performance choreographed by the side (taken 05/08/07), 3063001 - “Performing Windsor’; A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Yet at the same time, these photographic performances provide some of the most obvious examples of unregulated tourism practices in the exhibition of the guided tour and thus signify that improvised performances do occur within the boundaries of enclavie spaces. Particularly on the bus and boat tours, where passengers had an evident difficulty in satisfying their endeavours of capturing ‘romantic® landscape images due to the spatial restrictions imposed to reduce individual movement in a tour in motion, a camera would often be passed around between familial members who hence performed a “familyness” to be captured though a lens focused by a “family gaze” (figure 14). Places thereby emerged as scenes for acting out and framing active and tender family life for the camera rather than as spaces strategically constructed by the guide to be obediently consumed by a passive audience (Barrenholdt et al, 2004: 70-71): “Taking pictures with the kids in is how I best remember a place... want to reflect, back and say, “Aw, look at litle Bobby here, He’s in Windsor, and look, he’s got ice cream all over his top, typical!” That’s what’s important... Yes, it’s all well and good to sce the castle and whatever, but unless my boys are here, it’s [the touristic experience] meaningless.” -Interview with City Sightseeing tour participant, 18/08/07. Figure 14: Performing with a camera: The ‘family gaze’ of Windsor within the tour boat enclave (taken 26/08/07), 31GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided ‘Tour 0801566 Improvised photographic performances as a means of selective place consumption were also present in the walking tour when participants would break away from the group to take pictures of each other (figure 15), thus creating their own ‘authentic’ heritage experience. This “second gaze’ not only potentially thwarted the altempts of tourist managers to produce ‘coherent? and “bounded” spaces in place (Edensor, 2006: 32), but will deconstruct the enclavic spatiality of place (re)construetion in the tour through post- tour articulations of their photographs out of place. As a popular expression of social memory, these photographs are ‘performed’ as alternative readings to the fixed explanations of formal heritage to thus allow an individualised understanding of places and their histories (Atkinson, 2005: 147), thereby ‘disinheriting” (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996: 21) the guide’s fixed, essentialist representations of Windsor: T always take photographs...{to] put them in an album...and show my friends when they come over...And you say, “Look where we've been” and they might say, “Oh, we went there in 1973"... T wouldn't be able to regurgitate what the guide has said in ten hours time, et alone in ten years! But a photo will say, “Oh, look, we went on a isor, and it was sunny, and that’s where the Queen lives” tour in -Interview with French Brothers tour participant, 04/08/07. (see Appendix IIl, pp. 47-48, for examples of how tourists subvert aspects of the “official” narrative in opposition to those who passively receive it). Figure 15: Consuming Windsor through a lens: An improvised photographic 2 performance in the walking tour (taken 19/08/07).GG3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 080156 Chapter V Conclusion The objective of this study was to examine how Windsor was performed as a touri place through investigating the practices of the guide and tourist in the guided tour; a ‘tourism in motion’ thus examined in order to determine how touristic space is produced, exhibited and consumed. I will now conclude this study, ‘Performing Windsor’, to understand the relationship between place and performance in tourism. T would like to draw attention to Wang’s (2006: 73) analogy of a guide's itinerary as a cultural way of “cooking” tourist resources in order to emphasise the role of the tour ‘guide as a professional mentor, tutored to make ‘consume-able’ a heritage for tourist consumptions in the (re)presentation of a visualised landscape; a ‘sceneography” (Gottdiener, 1997: 73) thus enforced to authenticate a guide’s narrative and validate a selective portrayal of history. The enclavic character of the bus and boat tours in particular provide an “environmental bubble” (Cohen, 1972: 166) in which the guide, as director, can socially organise and systematise Urry’s (2002) ‘tourist gaze” to thus format 1 ‘social patterning’ whereby a routinised collective gaze is visually objectified under the guide's ‘direction’ (Urry, 2002; 3). The guides of the walking tours, too, have a lesser regard for the multi-sensual experiences of place, despite the ‘on the ground” embodiment of space, to favour a much greater sensitivity to the visual clements of a Iandscape. Having pre-determined their route through the seripture of a tour narrative, a walking ide’s guise as ‘original pathfinder’ thus becomes associated with ‘MacCannell’s (1973) formulation of ‘staged authenticity’ whereby guides have artificially staged a “front region’ to dupe tourists into the belief that they are witnessing the ‘teal lives’ of the Royal Family living in Windsor. It is important to conclude, however, that tourists are not the cultural dupes they are sometimes made out to be, Although many do collectively engage in choreographed performances in order to conform to a socially constructed tourist identity, a closer 336G3001 - ‘Performing Windsor’; A Study of Touristic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 understanding of tourist practices comes from a study of touristic performance at an individual level; those who re-compose place through their own imaginations to reflect more personalised visions of Windsor. In ‘ad-libbing’ the scripts they have been given (Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, 2005: 1-2), tourists can find ‘anything’ a potential attraction (MacCannell, 1999: 192), hence there can be “no universal experience that is true for all tourists at all times... [t]here is no single tourist gaze (Urry, 2002: 1). ‘The walking tours in particular allows for an “experience [of place]...that engages all the senses, not simply the visual” (Ryan, 1997: 25), enabling a greater reflexivity in tourist (renegotiations of ‘official’ meanings articulated by the guide. Yet despite the tighter spatial regulations imposed on bus and boat tour participants, these tours are inevitably self-referential experiences for those on board, whom mediate what they see against their ‘own geographical imaginations of Windsor, thereby transgressing the guide’s discursive natrative in their performance of a ‘second gaze’ (MacCannell, 2001: 36). It is the tourists’ appreciations, thoughts and insights of the past, therefore, that are strongly characteristic of an authentic experience (Shaw and Williams, 2004: 139), signifying that place is not just a ‘stage’ performed upon, but a fluid space created through performance (Coleman and Crang, 2002: 1). In order to take this study further, I would have liked to have investigated the performative practices of tourists under non-tour circumstances to more fully understand. the way space is performed in heterogeneous space. In his study, “Tourists at the Taj’, Tim Edensor (1998) investigated the tourist performances of backpackers at the Taj Mahal, who were far less regulated by spatio-temporal constraints than package tourists. By being on tour in Windsor, the tour participants by virtue of their actions were, to an extent, willing to be led by the guide. Had there not been any restrictions imposed on the length of this study, I would have similarly examined the narrative of the contemporary ‘fldneur’ (Cresswell, 2006: 18) - the tourist whom distances himself from the guided tour strolling freely around the town - to better understand the circumstances within which tourist performances are enacted. 3463001 - ‘Performing Windsor’: A Study of Toutistic Performance in the Guided Tour 0801566 Chapter VI Bibliography Abererombie, N. and Longhurst, B. (1998), Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, Sage Publications, London. Atkinson, D. (2005), ‘Heritage’, in Atkinson, D., Jackson, P. A., Sibley, D. and ‘Washbourne, N. (eds.) (2005) Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas’, ‘Tauris, London. Berenholdt, J. O., Haldrup, M. Larsen, J. and Urry, J. (2004), Performing Tourist Places, Ashgate, Aldershot, Hants. Ball, M., Day, K., Livergant, E. and Tivers, J. 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