Guided Tours – Visiting with local experts

Throughout Britain, Blue and Green Badge Tourist Guides offer tours around towns and to individual destinations and buildings. Giving visitors invaluable insights into the background and history of an area.

Guides cover many interesting themes reflecting an individual passion they may have. They also cover particular themes and features of specific towns. Some will be able to  work with you to create a tour tailored to your own particular interests.

We can’t give you information about every guide and tour in this piece. However, we thought it would be useful to present a few examples. We are keen to add information about the guides available in particular towns on the relevant entries in this site. Suggestions will be very welcome to help us do this, but here are a few excellent experts we already know.

 Coventry

There is a growing interest in Coventry – the next UK City of Culture. Even before work to get it ready for the limelight in 2021.

Henry VI, William Shakespeare, the Cathedral and Music Museum are just some of the interesting tour ideas awaiting you in a city. There is more to reveal than that famously naked medieval countess!

Roger Bailey is a Blue Badge Tourist Guide and Coventry is his home town. He is well able to tailor a visit to the city for your group. He also guides throughout the Heart of England.

His other specialisms include Oxford, Leicester and The Cotswolds. He can take you on tours in Stratford upon Avon following the life of William Shakespeare from the cradle to the grave.

Canterbury

Canterbury & Beyond is a new company of five Blue Badge Tourist Guides based in the Southeast. They want to enhance visitor experiences by offering tours away from the more obvious destinations.

The guide lives locally and has great enthusiasm for the area, the guides are flexible and client focused. They are able to tailor tours to suit particular interests.

Canterbury & Beyond want to help you take in the great variety that Kent has to offer from seaside resorts and medieval towns, castles and stately homes to gardens and vineyards. The team want to help visitors enjoy more of the rich heritage and culture of their area. They love sharing their knowledge with groups and perhaps include a country pub lunch too!

Chichester

Established in 2012 Chichester Tour guides  grouped together qualified tourist guides and joined forces. They offer regular walking tours around the historic West Sussex town.

The group has developed other coach and walking tours in the South East with special interest tours. Diverse tours include ‘The Romans beneath your feet’ and ‘Herons, Peregrines and Golden Cockerels’.

York

Yorkshire Blue Badge Tourist Guides can offer panoramic coach tours of dramatic countryside. Also towns and villages or site-guided tours of the county’s many stately homes and ruined monasteries.

Other ideas include beautiful gardens and TV locations from the Victoria TV series to Harry Potter.

Walks around cities and towns include York, Leeds and Hull. 

Cardiff

Wales has a rich industrial, mining and cultural heritage. It also boasts many legends, stories, and music that the tour reveals. Tours are with one of the Official Green and Blue Badge Tourist Guides.

Their knowledge and interpretations can bring to life the big cities like Cardiff and Swansea or welsh towns including Laugharne. The guides can help you explore behind the scenes in many castles, and other historic cultural and industrial buildings.

Lacock

Made up of houses mostly built some 700 years ago, it was once a busy wool making centre, but when the train line bypassed Lacock in the mid-19th century, the town was frozen in time – untouched by the modern world.

Walk the streets with your local Lacock guide, stop for lunch at the George pub with its “dog spit” and wooden beams. Hear about the many TV and film productions that have filmed in the town, making it seem familiar to people from around the world – from the BBC production of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Cranford, to Downton Abbey.

And for Harry Potter fans, your private guide can take you for a visit to Lacock Abbey and reveal several locations that were used in the filmls.

Salisbury

The Cathedral is the tallest medieval structure in Great Britain and is simply sublime. Join your private guide for a tour of this 13th century masterpiece in stone. Climb the tower to be rewarded with views that have charmed artists and writers. See one of the four original copies of that defining 1215 charter guaranteeing our democratic rights, Magna Carta.

Your local guide will lead you on a city walking tour to see a court where ill-fated convicts were transported to exile in Australia, an execution site with its 500 year old ghost, and the world’s only cinema with a 15th century foyer. You may even like to head out of town to Old Sarum, an abandoned Iron Age fortress that became an important 11th century base for Norman soldiers and churchmen, and much later an infamous parliamentary ‘rotten borough’.