February 2025 marked the kick-off for the new ‘Critical History Tours’ project, the latest in EuroClio’s Contested Histories Initiative, which examines contestations over physical representations of historical legacies in public spaces. ‘Critical History Tours’ is a dynamic, multi-partner initiative designed to create and promote successful critical history walking tours across European countries. The project aims to improve public awareness and critical understanding of Europe’s historical heritage.
One of the project’s main strengths is the transnational consortium involved in its innovation, planning and implementation. The consortium includes EuroClio and the Contested Histories Initiative, Uncomfortable Oxford, Liberation Route Europe, ATRIUM, International Students of History Association (ISHA), and the Balkan Museum Network – you can read more about the consortium organisations here. Each organisation brings its own experience of dealing critically with the past in a range of countries.
Following the project’s kick-off, we sat down with Paula Larsson, the Operational Director of Uncomfortable Oxford, and John Patrick Leech, a representative of ATRIUM who specialises in European relationships and dissonant heritage, to discuss the vision for ‘Critical History Tours’ and the role of their respective organisations in this collaborative project.
Anna Roizes: Let’s start by introducing Uncomfortable Oxford and ATRIUM.
Paula Larsson: Uncomfortable Oxford is two things. It’s public engagement with a research project, originally designed and developed by History PhD students at the University of Oxford. It’s also a social enterprise, taking historical research and using the skills and knowledge that history studies and education bring by employing historians to give walking tours.
These walking tours are themselves critically engaged with the ongoing issues that we deal with when we look at the past and live in the present. So we are looking at uncomfortable conversations about statues, about street names, about funding, and where and why certain countries, spaces and buildings have huge amounts of wealth accumulation over time.
The goal of Uncomfortable Oxford is to raise uncomfortable conversations. They are discussion-based tours, so very much aimed at the co-production of knowledge and bringing in conversation through the medium of a walking tour. It means we are de-platforming the historical expert as the only person who gets to speak on these topics.
John Patrick Leech: ATRIUM is a cultural route based on municipalities and local authorities in cities and towns. Its objective is to put together the dissonant, difficult and uncomfortable experiences of those places that have a physical legacy deriving from totalitarian, autocratic and non-democratic regimes. Born in Italy, ATRIUM particularly spans cities that were developed under fascism, and now covers seven different countries.
Anna: I wanted to discuss the fact that this is a collaborative project, the consortium is made up of multiple organisations from different countries. What would you say is the value that comes from having a collaborative effort like this one?
Patrick: It’s an example of the usefulness of networking. As long as you are working on your own topic, you’re not going very far until you find that there are all sorts of people who work on similar topics or in a similar way. I think it’s fantastic to work with these organisations, they have a lot of experience in the field. ATRIUM has experience in local tour guides, but less so with professional tour guides. So this is an opportunity for us particularly to develop our tour guides. ATRIUM has got a very much on the ground experience with municipalities, so we can contribute that; EuroClio has thirty years experience in history teaching – it’s all a learning environment for us.
Paula: Same for us. Uncomfortable Oxford has set skills and set experience, most of which is based locally within the UK. One of the motivations for EuroClio was the desire to work with adult education, which was where our skill set was – with tourism, and working with academics. Just knowing the structure of how history is done in the different countries of the consortium is really fascinating, and also speaks to the way in which a lot of the activities we all are doing are transferable across locales. The final iteration of this project just simply wouldn’t be possible if we weren’t all working together like this. It’s been really, really enriching.
One of the main things we want is the growth of a community of like-minded individuals who love to do this work. We have been doing this work now for almost 10 years, easing people into uncomfortable conversations. The larger our community has grown as we grew as an organisation, so has the amount of support that came with that growth of community. I think that can be replicated in people who are like-minded across Europe. We can share skills, we can share experiences, stories, give feedback for peer review and just grow as a network, as a community of people who really want to make a change to how cities are experienced and how history is understood.
Anna: The ‘Contested History Tours’ project envisions the development of in-person critical history tours, as well as courses for certifying tour guides using critical methodologies. Can you give me a rundown of what you’re aiming for with these?
Paula: Tours are not stand alone activities – to create a tour guide, they have to go through some kind of course. One of the greatest frustrations of academics with public engagement research projects is the fact that there is no lifespan beyond an initial event. One of the reasons why we transitioned this from a project into a social enterprise was to ensure it has sustainability, which is especially important when you value people’s work and their expertise. We wanted something sustainable, which is the idea of the course. We don’t want it to be a one-off activity. The tours should become replicable, with the hope that other organisations will want to train their staff in the same type of skills. It means that the tours that we develop can stay and have a life span with those organisations.
Anna: That leads nicely onto a question I had about the impact of these tours, and tourism itself. This project targets teaching adults as tourists. What would you say is the importance of educating adults through a project like this one?
Paula: I think an interesting aspect of tourism is that anytime you are a tourist, you’re actually already involved in educating yourself about another place, another culture, and you are interested in learning more just by being there. And so you already have a gateway into somebody who is interested in learning more, unlike school children who are forced to take part in an educational activity. For tourists, it’s a conscious choice for exploration.
And there’s another aspect to this, which is that we’re not just targeting tourists. We are targeting tourism, including guides who want to upskill and become capable of doing these tours in their own current context.
Patrick: ATRIUM is particularly interested in sustainable tourism. One area of development is moving tourism away from mass tourism, towards off-the-beaten-track tourism, which is also one of the European objectives in terms of tourism development generally.
That’s one aspect. Another aspect is a sort of internal tourism, in terms of rediscovering your city. ATRIUM works alongside the methodology of the Faro Convention of the Council of Europe, which is about the valorisation of your local heritage in order to develop and promote human rights and democracy. So it’s all about a new vision of your locality, I think, as well.
Anna: What makes a good city for the ‘Critical History Tours’ project?
Patrick: Well, it has to have a critical history, an aspect which is uncomfortable and difficult. I think it does also need a certain environment in terms of local associations, historians, or citizens who have got knowledge and commitment to the project before it starts.
We are putting together cities or towns which have got an inexorable tie to a difficult past. They have tried hard to forget sometimes, and tried to develop themselves without looking at it, but they have that tie. The project then enables them to repackage and re-talk about their city in self aware and critical terms
Paula: I would argue that every city is a good city. Every city has that history, some are just really great at ignoring it – especially the big ones, because there’s so much else you can
look at. It’s a lot easier to ignore the history of a city’s involvement in the slave trade and the wealth that it brought, than to look at a beautiful building and say, but that building does something new now, so focus on that instead.
Every city has the potential to do something with their history that could be critically analytical, that could address those issues. I think that there’s a need within every city, especially from the locals’ perspective, from the people who live in the city and experience it on the day to day, to reveal the parts that either are felt but not seen, or seen and not discussed.
Most of the cities we work in have the regular old tour – you know, welcome to the beautiful sights, see the pretty things, enjoy history, it’s really easy. What we want to do is say, history is never easy! There is always that thing that is not seen, that is not talked about, and still has a huge impact on your lived experience because of your identity, because of your nationality, because of your location, because of your skin colour, because of your education, your class, your disability, etc. History really feeds into all those lived aspects of the modern city.
