Twenty-six reviews is not a lot. It is enough to be useful and nowhere near enough to be pleased with yourself about, which is roughly the right amount for reading them honestly. I spent ten years in marketing, where reviews were something you generated, encouraged, and displayed. Now they are something that happens to me on a Saturday afternoon and I have no control over at all. Reading them properly has changed how I guide, and not in the way I expected. The numbers On Free

Group size changes this job more than the weather, the season, or the route. It changes it more than the subject does. And you find out which job you are doing about ninety seconds before you start. What twenty people need A large group is an audience, and an audience has physics. You have to be heard, which means the quiet observations go first. You have to keep a shape, or the back of the group ends up two crossings behind the front. You have to build in pauses for people t

"Free walking tour" is one of the most effective phrases in travel, and I use it, because it is true in the only sense that matters to you: you can join, and you owe nothing. It is also the phrase that quietly sets the price before anyone arrives. That is the part worth explaining, and I have never managed to explain it properly while walking backwards through a crowd. How it actually works You book. You show up. We walk for around two hours. At the end you decide what it was

I spent ten years in digital marketing. I was good at it. I knew how to make a number go up, how to write the line that makes someone click, how to build the thing that turns a stranger into a customer. Then I moved to Berlin, and a few years later I started walking backwards through the middle of it, talking to strangers about a city I did not grow up in. People ask how that happened. This is the honest version. The product nobody needed Marketing is not a dishonest professi

Most of what I describe on my walk isn't there anymore. The real craft of guiding is finding the one photograph that makes a vanished street visible again.

The viewing platform at the Fernsehturm is the one thing I regularly tell people to skip. Here's what I send them to do with those two hours instead.

Nobody books this part. Twenty minutes before every tour, standing by the World Clock with a green umbrella, I'm thinking about the same thing every time: am I going to be good today.

Berlin is flat, grey, and permanently under construction — and visitors are right about that. The mistake is trying to see more of it faster instead of standing still.

The question I'm asked most often is about the one thing my walk doesn't show you: what's actually left of the Berlin Wall. Here's where to go instead, and why my tour starts eight hundred years earlier.