Last June, Alice Procter started running free gallery tours. She had answered a call-out from Antiuniversity, a project that helps organise radical educational events, and wanted to try out an idea. Her plan was to take people through museums, looking at the ways colonialism continues to influence their displays and the aesthetics of art, and examine the role of empire in funding the spaces themselves. She didn’t think they’d be popular – but they sold out.



The MA student now does Uncomfortable Art tours at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the V&A, the National Maritime Museum and Tate Britain. “My parents took me to museums when I was a kid,” says the 23-year-old, “so I’ve always been very comfortable in art galleries. I have experience as a tour guide, I fit the profile of the typical young white girl who’s an art history student doing a guided tour. And I can use that.”

‘You know what you’re signing up for’ … Alice Procter leading a tour at the National Gallery. Photograph: Rose Green

Why the empire? “I have always been interested in the art of the British empire. I’m Australian and I grew up understanding there is a multiplicity to historical narratives. So I was aware that history is always just storytelling. I feel fairly confident in spaces like this, and coming in and telling stories in them, because I know that’s just what the building is. A building.”

The group who have turned up for today’s sold-out tour at Tate Britain are mostly white, mostly female and mostly young, something Procter says is typical. She also gets “arts students, people who work in education, and museum people who want to know how to do this sort of thing in their own institutions. Which is nice.”

It quickly becomes clear why Procter’s tours have done so well. Rarely using notes, she clearly knows what she’s talking about, mixing the historical context with present-day reflections on everything from corporate sponsorship to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at University College London. She also interrogates how the Tate displays the work, as well as the labels with information she suggests is glossed over or even unmentioned.

The tour, starting at 11am and lasting only an hour, is a quickfire look at select paintings and sketches from the 17th and 18th centuries. We begin with Elizabeth I, when “ideas of Britishness began to be defined”, and continue until the abolition of the British slave trade in 1833. It’s fascinating. We see William Hogarth’s sketches for A Rake’s Progress that, Procter explains, are filled with elements an 18th-century audience would have recognised as caricaturing and demonising everything deemed foreign.

Demonising … an engraving for A Rake’s Progress, 1735, by William Hogarth. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty

Later, she uses a William Beechey painting to point out the similarities between Sir Francis Ford’s anti-abolitionist arguments and the sentiment you sometimes hear today that British charity should begin at home with “the white working class” as opposed to abroad. She doesn’t shy away from politics, mentioning issues such as Brexit and handing attendees free badges saying: “Display it like you stole it.” Her website is equally blunt, containing portraits of fine-looking gents with words such as “murderer” or “illegal immigrant” scrawled over them in red.

This tour is relatively quiet. Procter says attendees “tend to be a lot more conversational” – but it’s clear the people agree with her. They are vocal, too, nodding and murmuring words such as “awful” whenever she mentions slavery. At times, it’s a little like an echo chamber.

One of Procter’s posters, featuring Lord Nelson. Photograph: George Procter

“You kind of know what you’re signing up for,” she says, “so I tend to get people who broadly agree with me.” Is this a good thing? She sighs. “I think it’s a thing. There are better places to have arguments over whether the British empire was good or bad than in an art gallery. The point of these tours is that they’re educational. So yes, people who come broadly agree with me, but they’re coming because they want to know more.”

Shamma, who is studying at the Royal College of Art and is originally from Dubai, says: “I did like the tour. I wanted to hear more, but there’s a lot of information and not much time.” Shamma admits to feeling “a little uncomfortable” as the tour went on. “I look at the techniques, and I’ve been so ignorant about how disgusting some of these works are. Suddenly I felt ashamed, like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to look at this any more.’ But I think it’s necessary.”

Procter has high hopes for the future. “At the moment, the tours are run from my kitchen. It’s just me, but they’re growing. I want to start working with other people, help people develop their own tours of different sites, get out of London, work with school groups. There’s so much I want to do, but I’m studying and suddenly this is a full-time job.

“My hope was that people could come and it would be a bit of a wake-up call. Then they would go and find more information.” However, those aims have changed. She hopes extra knowledge will encourage people to be more vocal, so that galleries will change everything from how they display work to what they put on the label. “That’s my bigger aim.”

• Find out more about future Uncomfortable Art Tours.