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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Burlington Arcade royal grocers Fortnum & Mason
through for a surprise meeting with two statesmen
known to the Queen - Churchill and Roosevelt.
You can buy refreshments locally before heading
home at 4-45pm.
This tour is available Monday to Saturday
throughout the year and includes gentle walking
that doesn’t cover a great distance with
opportunities to sit down during the
Westminster Abbey tour.
Adults: £29.00 Seniors: £26.00
Price valid 1st April 2013 to 31st March 2014
Tour guides have been welcoming visitors to
Westminster Abbey for more than 300 years!
Today only Blue Badge Tourist Guides are
allowed to take parties around the Abbey and
parties are only allowed to visit accompanied by
a Blue Badge guide. Groups cannot book a
Verger-led tour. Each of our team of Blue Badge
Guides has passed a dedicated Westminster
Abbey examination that requires them to know
every snippet of its history and every one of its
myriad monuments and yet not overwhelm the
visitor but help them to fully appreciate the joy
and noble beauty of the nation’s church. Here are
two of the team reflecting on their Abbey life.
Jeanie has been a Blue Badge guide for 30
years and a member of the City & Village
Tours team for more than 20 years.
‘London Blue Badge Guide training is the most
difficult in the world: not only does it include learning
all of London’s history, all its museums and great
buildings, but also every major tourist site within a
day’s reach of London, such as Stonehenge, Bath etc.
Nowadays the course takes 2 years to complete, but
when I qualified thirty years ago, the whole thing was
squeezed into six months, which almost caused my
poor overtired brain to explode!
Westminster Abbey presents a particular challenge –
not only is there 1,000 years of history to encompass,
but there are around 450 monuments, any of which the
examiner can ask about. Luckily it is one of the most
beautiful buildings in the world, so spending hours
walking around it is no hardship at all!
Guide training involves a high level of practical
training, so the examiners were allowed to play tricks
on their hapless victims, such as pretending to faint or
have a fit: rushing off and hiding behind a pillar:
pretending that they had been robbed by a pickpocket.
This tested your mettle under stress, and really sorts out
the candidates who can cope with anything that can
happen in a group situation.