27 Nov 2024
What does it take to become a St Albans Cathedral tour guide? Former lawyer Peter Goodman is undertaking six months of formal training for the role, and invites us to join him on his journey…
I arrived in St Albans a couple of weeks before my 18th birthday. I knew nobody in the district or even the county, as my previous homes were in the north of Scotland and Singapore.
Fifty-six years later I’m still here and St Albans has been, for me, the gift that keeps on giving. In turn I have tried to give back what I can and I have been lucky enough to be involved with many St Albans-based non-profit organisations.
My involvement with the Cathedral (but let’s call it the Abbey as most locals do) has been sporadic. From the earliest days I’ve regularly visited the Abbey. It’s a magnificent building but apart from the fact it used to be part of a monastery and that it was dissolved by Henry VIII I knew very little. One day I bought a small guidebook and found many interesting facts.
(Incidentally that small guidebook, or rather its successor, can still be bought at the Abbey at a cost of £2.)
Sometime after that, probably around the turn of the century, I bought The Hill of the Martyr, a somewhat scholarly book by Eileen Roberts which provides a lot of detail in relation to the history of the building. However that was enough for the time being and I wasn’t tempted to learn more.
Time moved on and two important events in my life took place in the Abbey. In 2014 I was privileged to host the Chamber of Commerce Community Business Awards in the Nave and in 2016 I was married in the Lady Chapel.
All of a sudden I felt a closer connection to the Abbey and, once I had ended full-time work, I decided to see if there was anything I could contribute. Covid then happened and eventually, early in 2024, I was ready to see what was available.
There’s a lot – stewarding events, bell ringing, flower arranging, guiding, textiles, singing, working in the Welcome Centre, the learning department and more.
For further information look at https://www.stalbanscathedral.org/volunteer-for-us.
I chose stewarding events (as I could help immediately) and also applied for the next training group to become a guide.
After taking and passing a couple of online courses on safeguarding I had a short but interesting interview with two senior members of the guide team. Thankfully I passed and was told I’d be informed of the training events I had to attend.
I was also given a reading list with 68 books and shorter publications on it. I’m hoping I don’t have to read, let alone memorise, all of them!
Since then I’ve had a bit of luck. An old friend of mine is emigrating to Spain and, unknown to me, she had trained and worked as a guide in the Abbey. She gifted me her library of approximately 15 books and other publications on “the list” and I’m slowly reading them.
The Abbey has a library (something else I didn’t know) and they have more of the books from “the list”.
While awaiting the first formal training session I’ve been on around 10 guided tours – mostly the standard tour but also the Tower Tour and the external Great Survivor Tour. So much to learn but it’s been fun and interesting.
And now it’s time to start the formal training and be introduced to my mentor…
