It’s that time of year again…A group of eager new faces came to meet us at the Unite offices for the annual New Guides Seminar and Reception on 18 March. This year was different as there is also a Mandarin course running in parallel so we had 40 trainees in total.

For visitors to London who want to document their trip through photography for sharing on social media or with family and friends back home, here are 10 iconic photo locations around the city. 

RAF Northolt is perhaps best known in the modern context as being the location where Diana’s body was flown back to England by the Prince of Wales in 1997 and for being the base for Typhoon fighter jets on security duty during the 2012 London Olympics. However the base is 100 years old in March 2015 (older than the RAF!) and was originally set up as an operation base for Royal Flying Corps units to defend London against Zeppelin air raids.

Following a report from Blue Badge Tourist Guide Victoria Herriott that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport had convened a Committee on Tourism, the Association of Professional Tourist Guide (APTG) was invited to give evidence at a meeting on 27 January. This was the result of intensive lobbying by Unite-sponsored MPs following the acceptance of the motion on the Revised Professional Qualifications Directive at conference.

The Royal Academy of Arts will host an exhibition of the works of Richard Diebenkorn.   Revered as one of the great post-war masters in his native United States, Richard Diebenkorn is an artist whose staunchly independent career takes us from abstraction to figuration and back again.  He is described by the Washington Post as one of America’s “finest abstract painters.”

One of America’s most revered cultural institutions, The Smithsonian, is in talks about building an outpost on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Stratford Waterfront, close to the site of the former Water Polo Arena.

Two ‘lost’ statues have been identified as original Michelangelo sculptures – and are possibly the only surviving bronzes by him, experts have claimed. The pair, which show naked young men riding panthers, are described as ‘phenomenally important’ and, if truly by the master, would solve one of the greatest mysteries in art history.

Marlene Dumas is one of the most prominent painters working today. Her intense, psychologically charged works explore themes of sexuality, love, death and shame, often referencing art history, popular culture and current affairs.

Madame Tussauds London is opening a new Star Wars experience in Baker Street on Saturday, 16th May.   

On a briskly cold January morning, fellow Blue Badge Tourist Guide Steven Szymanski inducted an enthusiastic group into his passion for bridges on a walk that took in Tower Bridge to Waterloo, via St Magnus Martyr, the Steelyard and Bankside. 

Keith Harding led a group of fellow Blue Badge Tourist Guides around Surrey Quays – an area often unfairly overlooked, as it lies between Rotherhithe and Greenwich. From Greenland Pier we walked along the bank of the Thames, known as Deptford Strand. Then to Convoys Wharf, the site of the Royal Naval Dockyard since the time of Henry VIII and Tsar Peter the Great’s sojourn in the area and finally the Royal Victorian Victualling Yards.

My friend Phil Coppell, a Liverpool Blue Badge Tourist Guide, tells me that he took Ray Davies a member of the English rock band The Kinks on a Beatles tour some years ago. He queued up and paid for his ticket like everyone else and, during the tour, mentioned that he had originally set his song Waterloo Sunset in Liverpool but the line ‘Mersey Sunset’ did not scan and he moved it to London. He had always had a soft spot for Liverpool and said that whenever The Kinks played at the Cavern or other venues they always had a great reception.