New Audio Tour Launched

Old Haunts is an interactive audio tour of Spring Gardens in Buxton launched as part of the town’s High Street Heritage Action Zone project.

Old Haunts is an interactive audio tour with a difference. Follow your guide, Matt (Michael Grady-Hall) an aspiring local historian with a passion for Buxton’s history, who has returned to his hometown of Buxton to record an audio walking tour. But things don’t go quite to plan with his spooky sister, Claire (Suzanne McGrail), along for the ride. 

Setting off from outside The Pump Room, the tour uses smartphone location technology to autoplay each stop of the tour when you reach the correct location. Matt wants to bring some of Buxton’s lesser-known history to life, but Claire is more focused on Buxton’s ghostly goings-on.

Local actors from Buxton Drama League and REC Theatre provide the voices of some of Buxton’s spectral residents, who all seem to need someone to listen to them, while Matt desperately tries to keep the spirits’ silliness at bay, and everyone’s mind on the historical facts.

Written by Buxton-born writers Tom Crawshaw and Alice de Cent, with technology devised by theatrical innovators Despite the Monkey, Old Haunts invites locals and visitors alike to decide; will you follow the tour, and learn all about Spring Gardens through the ages, or will you get side-tracked by an apparition on a mission? It’s up to you to choose your path.

All you need is a smartphone, some headphones and a little time to hear from the colourful denizens of Spring Gardens’ past.

Go to oldhaunts.uk to access the spook-ridden drama.

Old Haunts has been created for the Buxton Our Street Cultural Programme of Buxton’s Heritage Action Zone project, funded by Historic England, supported by High Peak Borough Council, and will be available until March 2024.

Last updated 03.07.2023