Today, three things we’ve been working at for months – years, even – all happened at once.
Firstly, we published two tours of London by Sir Stephen Fry and the elves behind QI, one of the UK’s most entertaining, intelligent panel shows.
Secondly, we launched a partnership with History Hit, which produces some of the world’s most popular history podcasts. They have all sorts of tours lined up, but the first two are by History Hit’s founder, Dan Snow – another well known Londoner. One tells the story of the Great Fire that transformed this great city. The other is about the first King Charles, who was executed in front of his own palace.
And finally, we have a new logo and a new look. I’ve been gazing at that red dot embraced by a winding route for a few months now and I find myself liking what it symbolises more and more.
It’s been about twelve years since I started VoiceMap, and it felt like time to switch over to something more figurative. That transition – from our old literal icon, with headphones on a pin – represents a wider change in the way we hope you’ll think about VoiceMap.
The idea in the beginning was simple, really: I thought there was something magical about attaching a GPS location to an audio file, and then knitting them all together into a route. You used to need dedicated hardware for this, but by 2014 everybody who could afford one seemed to have an iPhone – and I saw a way to open up this magical new medium to other storytellers.
There are now roughly 800 of us, offering well over 2,000 tours, and there’s a new VoiceMap every day. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been travelling around Europe, doing some of them. I see them as an invitation, not just to the destination, but to travel in a way that is more engaged and meaningful – more human, you could say, in our era of AI slop.
My hope is that you’ll see them as an invitation too, and join us in being curiously human wherever you are, and wherever you go next.
