When Dark Chester first launched, I write a guest blog post for the British Guild of Tourist Guides (BGTG) to explain my ideas behind the tour [pictured above in Chester].
Here’s an extract:
I wanted to compile a 90-minute dark-tourism tour, exploring some of the favourite folk tales, legends and superstitions that have fascinated Cestrians, that’s the people of Chester, for centuries. I also wanted to let visitors peer behind the visitor-friendly façade of some of our best- known attractions to uncover the darker and lesser-known stories of the macabre.
But don’t worry. The Dark Chester tour is no jump-scares pantomime, nor is it a dry, academic lecture.
It’s an atmospheric evening walk, mixing a dash of Horrible Histories with some League of Gentlemen-style dark humour.
We had come to our local park for a hands-on class in the burgeoning sport of golf croquet, a faster, T20 cricket-style take on the traditional Association Croquet game.
The key difference is that golf croquet has one stroke per turn and, when a hoop is scored, all players move onto the next.
We arrived to find Mark Lloyd of the Chester Croquet Club [logo above] marking the flat, grass court with six cast-iron hoops and a central peg set firmly into the ground.
Mark, a regular club player with over thirty years of experience and a former world ranking of 230, had played some hard-fought matches in his time.
But was he ready for two truculent teenagers and their non-sporting father, the latter perennially the last person to be picked for any school sports team?
Handing out four coloured balls and mallets, Mark appeared to be taking it in his stride.
‘For me,’ he explained as we hit a few warmup shots and tried running a few hoops, ‘croquet is all about strategy.”
I’m always thinking three balls ahead. That’s why it’s a mix of snooker, boules, and chess.’
Players, makers and stitchers of the 2023 Chester Mystery Plays Company (image: Chester Mystery Plays).
The Chester Mystery Plays return to Chester Cathedral this summer, the season coinciding with the Chester Heritage Festival.
The production comprises a huge cast of professional and non-professional performers (pictured above), many volunteering for roles on stage, in the choir, or behind the scenes.
I wrote a preview of the production, based around an interview with the actor Nick Fry, who shares the role of God with a female actor this summer.
The 24 plays, based on Bible stories, form an overarching narrative from The Creation to The Last Judgement, and are performed on a five-year cycle in Chester.
They originated in the city in 1300s, with small-scale church productions and a script in Latin. By the 1400s, the plays had been adopted by the Crafts Guilds, bodies of local tradesmen like a modern-day trade union, to be staged and performed in Middle English.
The plays formed part of the three-day Feast of Corpus Christi Fair with the players performing on pageant carts and the audience standing at fixed points around the city, such as The Cross and Abbey Gateway — locations still there today.
The Plays became associated with bawdy crowd behaviour and were banned after the Reformation, with last performance in Chester in 1578; making Chester home to the longest-running cycle in medieval times.
But the plays returned to the city as part of the 1951 Festival of Britain, and have been performed at Chester Cathedral since 2013.
Nick Fry, says:
“The Chester Mystery Plays reflect the history of both the cathedral and the city. And it’s a living history. The plays are steeped in history, yet remain of the community and for the community.”
