A Visitor's Guide to London

A Visitor's Guide to London
Heath Bunting, 1995

A Visitor's Guide to London was created by Heath Bunting in 1995. The author chose to represent places around London through pictures. The viewer is able to choose between directions such as north, south, east, and west. Also, the viewer could choose a place from a map. The website engages the user, who is ultimately in control of where they end up. The pictures themselves are in black and white and kind of grainy. So the viewer may not always be certain of their location.

"In Visitors' Guide to London, initially a HyperCard project and then put on the Net, he offers a way of looking at London quite different from the usual tourist clichés. Bunting employs low-resolution black-and-white images with no gray-scales, along with a very simple navigational system. The visitor moves around the city by clicking on icons for north, northeast, east, etc., on a map of the Underground. From the map he or she can access any stations, but only to find banal photographs which Bunting has taken there at the surface. He thus accomplishes what he himself calls “the already out-of-date psycho-geographical tour of London, ideal for foreign visitors, with over 250 sites of anti-historical value, incomplete, without instructions, now available for all (the rich) on the World Wide Web.”

Anyone could find a better visitor's guide to London, but it would be in a book, not on the web. Bunting gives the viewer something to interact with, even if the pictures are low quality. Interactivity is a characteristic that correlates with the internet. The viewer clicks and is immediately transported to another place in London. You certainly can't get that from a book.