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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
away from the hustle and bustle of the most crowded
galleries. If you came with us to the British Museum
to see the Terracotta Army (First Emperor)
exhibition in 2007/2008 you may rest assured that
for the 2013 tour we visit different galleries and talk
about different things. If you are NADFAS, National
Trust or an historical or archaeological society you
may rest assured that our erudite Blue Badge guides
are very clued up and will not disappoint. Whatever
type of group you organise trips for we can promise
that as well as being very informative the galleries
tour offered to complement our visits to the Pompeii
exhibition is going to be really entertaining.
Your folk will be hanging on to every word.
The Ancients at Home
galleries tour is a thoughtful
and illuminating journey from prehistory to the
world’s first very cities in Ancient Mesopotamia and
on through the domestic life of some fascinating
ancient peoples including Babylonians, Etruscans,
Philistines, Persians and closer to home the Beaker
People and the shivering young Roman legionnaires
who wrote home for warm socks to wear with their
sandals. We concentrate on the personal possessions
that people owned and valued and that give us an
insight into their everyday lives. We’ll come across
Nebuchadnezzar and the Queen of the Night and
see the elegant silver lyre excavated by Agatha
Christie’s husband on a trip that inspired one of her
famous stories. We discover how popular board
games were in the homes of the ancients and see
how ancient folk set about keeping the kids quiet.
We all like to dress the table for a special occasion and
the ancients did too – there are beautiful silver table
services here that wouldn’t look out of place today in
Liberty of London. The largest ever hoard of late
Roman gold and silver found anywhere within the
Roman Empire was discovered entirely by chance at
Hoxne in Suffolk in 1992. The coins and some 200
items of silver tableware and gold jewelry, thought to
represent the belongings of one wealthy family, were
found when a farmer asked a friend with a metal
detector to track down a hammer he’d lost in the long
grass. We also see a gold cup, a prized possession from
early Bronze Age Cornwall that George V used to keep
his cuff links and collar studs in until it finally found
its way into the British Museum in the 1930s.
Only Blue Badge guides are allowed to conduct guided
tours at the British Museum – they have to master the
basic
highlights tour
including the not inconsiderable
skill of knowing their way around the labyrinth of
rooms to pass the Blue Badge course but it’s only
some Blue Badge guides who have made it their
business to move beyond the highlights and immerse
themselves in a deep understanding of the most
amazing museum on earth. In the second of our
Guide’s Eye series turn over for Blue Badge guide
Sarah, (pictured to the left guiding in the British
Museum with a NADFAS group) talking about guiding
the British Museum. Sarah was the first member of the
City & Village Tours guiding team and has clocked up
an impressive 24 years of service with us.
Seated, Agatha Christie and her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan
in Iraq, the inspiration for a 1936 Poirot story: Murder in Mesopotamia.