IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

This paper discusses how the Old Royal Naval College (ORNC), part of the Maritime Greenwich UNESCO World Heritage Site in London, England, is building on the increase in film tourism to bring its role as an international film and television location (e.g ‘Les Miserables’, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, ‘The Crown’) into the visitor experience, via a film tour. Designed by renowned British architect Christopher Wren, the ORNC today is an imposing complex of buildings. However, visitors typically possess little knowledge of the site’s surprisingly varied history, which is not easily decipherable from the architecture itself. The aim of the tour is to engage visitors with the tangible through the intangible: braiding stories from its recent history as a film location with narrative strands from the more distant past. We explain the nature and design of these strands, including why a different approach was taken to other film location tours, such as the Game of Thrones tours in Northern Ireland. We argue that one of the attractions of the ORNC as a film location is the potential for its iconic architecture to both function as a universal visual shorthand – signifying concepts and contexts such as power, authority, civilisation, justice, empire – and to stand in for a variety of specific institutions, places and countries. These cinematic affordances relate to the ORNC’s several cultural pasts. The film tour thus engages visitors not only in its past and present as a film location, but with its role in 600 years of British history.