As you may know, part of my internship is to create a walking tour about Canada’s confederation. This left me wondering, have I been missing out all these years? Should I have been going on tours instead of visiting museums? Do they teach me the same things? This blog post will help those of you with the same questions as me. I thought about some of my own answers to this, but realised I was sitting in the same office as some tour experts! To help us all out, I sat down with Kaitlin Wainwright, Interim Executive Director and Director of Programming at Heritage Toronto.
Let’s start with the most important question you have (and that I had for Kaitlin) – what are the differences between tours and museums? The answer is that museums and tours show you history in completely different ways! When you go to a museum what you are seeing are collected and curated artefacts placed on a display, usually geared towards a specific theme. A tour, on the other hand, has an almost unlimited amount of intangible heritage to see. The entire city is your museum. While one curator chooses a museum’s display, so you only get one perspective, on a tour you can speak to members of the community to find out what multiple people have to say.
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Now – you might be thinking well that sounds great but I can see the city while I walk to the museum. Experts guide tours and historians who specialise in the city’s heritage research the tour script. For the script that I’m writing I have been researching through the library for months! The stops are carefully decided upon to show you what the most important areas of the city to the tour topic are. Tours are also multi-sensory! A tour about a specific culture can stop and taste their cuisine, a music tour can hear the albums discussed. Digital images of what a building used to look like can be viewed next to the present building – you can easily see the relationship between the city’s past and present.
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So now you’re probably thinking woah! Tours seem so cool, why does anyone go to a museum? Good question! The issue of pace on a tour can be hard for some people. No one enjoys chasing a tour guide around a city while not taking anything in, or having to stop for way too long at a boring site. At a museum one can control the pace of their tour. Kaitlin described three types of museum goers – the ‘streaker’ who races to the end, the ‘stroller’ who takes in piece by piece and the ‘scholar’ who reads all descriptions and asks questions. Whichever category you fall under, it is likely that at some point over a tour you will want to speed up or slow down.
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What a confusing place we’ve ended up in! Now we’re all wondering How to choose between a tour and a museum! How do I pick between two awesome options? I have some great news here! It is possible to build a bridge between tours and museums! The Royal Ontario Museum and other museums now offer tours. Heritage Toronto also can bring the artefacts on the tour! A small percentage of the artefacts that a museum has are put on display, so Heritage Toronto can take some artefacts from storage along on the tour. For the music heritage tour we even brings album covers, ticket stubs and sometimes even special guests like venue owners and performers! You can even go on a self-guided tour if pace is a huge problem for you.
To sum up – I hope this blog post helped some of you decide how to learn about the history of the next city that you visit. We all benefit from different learning environments and I have laid out just a few of the many, many unique benefits of tours and museums.
Photo Credit: Google Images