Gaming sparkle brings the 9th century to life in Winchester

I’m not much of a gamer. I love the concept of immersing myself as a character in a fantasy world, but my extreme impatience with the performance of repetitive tasks means I never manage to get past the first challenge. No matter how intrigued I am by the story, I can never manage to sail my pirate ship out of the bay, get my knight over the first bandit-infested bridge, or get my Hobbits beyond The Shire. That hasn’t stopped me, however, from having a huge admiration for the Assassin’s Creed franchise. 

The makers’ attention to historical detail and storytelling intrigues me. I’ve stumbled across them a couple of times in recent sightseeing: first as a display room within the Ashmolean’s excellent exhibition on ancient Knossos, and again as I was preparing to visit Monteriggione in Tuscany. The picturesque Italian fortress is the setting for the second game in the series. Ancient Crete turns up in the 11th. Those connections with my life were almost accidental. Now gaming company Ubisoft has made a full foray into the world of tourism, creating 878 AD, an immersive Anglo-Saxon experience in my local cathedral town of Winchester. They worked in partnership with the Hampshire Cultural Trust and Sugar Creative. 

While I was slightly disappointed with my visit … more on the drawbacks later … overall I think this is a magnificent way to get people excited about history. Particularly one of England’s lesser-known time periods. I’d love to see similar attractions spreading across the country. It’s a particularly good introduction for children; I’d start here with any visitor to Winchester under 18.

It’s also a brilliant use of the excess retail space that’s plaguing most town centres in the UK. Functionally, it’s simply a bit of set design and video projection, some computer screens and display cases, information boards and a few costumed hosts injected into vacant space in a modern shopping mall. With the actual history sprawling just outside, 878 AD doesn’t need to be in a fancy building. It gives people an introduction and then sends them off with an interactive app to explore the reality.

The “experience” invitees you to insert yourself into the world of King Alfred and his battles against the Vikings. You join him after he’s hidden in the marshes and burned those pesky cakes (something many people seem to remember even if they don’t have a clue about the rest of his story) but before the climactic Battle of Edington in May of 878 (something few beyond fans of The Last Kingdom will know about). The citizens of Winchester are waiting anxiously for news, having waved most of their able-bodied men away.

That set-up creates an excellent excuse to then wander around Anglo-Saxon Winchester, learning about the people, their lives and the specifics of the city at the time. At one end of the long gallery two large walls form a corner onto which panning shots of the city from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla run. The graphics are both impressive and built with respectable amounts of historic research. (A small side gallery offers screens where you can explore details of how they built the game itself.) Other digital displays use the graphics as a starting point to explore different aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. There are display cases with some real historical artefacts but it’s mostly re-creations.

Strip away the fiction of time travel and it’s a fairly straightforward introduction to the Anglo-Saxons. If you want to see proper “stuff” from the time period, you’d be better served getting to the British Museum to stare down the helmet from the Sutton Hoo burial ship and the other goodies in Room 41. But it’s fun, and the fiction of the pre-battle tension gives the displays a relevance you’d miss if you just walked into a museum.

You also have the role-playing support staff to help interpret while keeping up the fiction. They’re very good at staying in character. Ask them about the Romans, for example, and they’ll explain that while there are ruins scattered about town that they often plunder for building material, few outside the nobility know much about the people who left them. There are regular story telling sessions where staff members … aka 9th century residents of Winchester … dive deeper into the action and get the audience involved. Inviting all the children to form a shield wall, complete with pint-sized shields, is an inspired way to get them having fun while teaching a real lesson about how battles of the time were fought. 

You end up in a small theatre where the film catches you up on the results at Edington. A resounding success for Alfred, his Viking opponent agreeing to convert to Christianity and respect borders, and the cornerstone of a united England laid. It’s well done. Patriotic and inspiring without being corny, informative enough so even the most historically ignorant can’t leave without grasping why there’s a bloody huge statue of Alfred at the top of the High Street.

But that’s only half of your experience. From here you download an app and hit the streets. There are games to play and puzzles to solve, along with excellent information about what you’re looking at. I was particularly fond of the bits where your phone super-imposes a graphic (from the game, naturally) of what was there in the 9th century over what you’re looking at today. The app takes you on a circular walk that will be familiar to locals, but offers new perspectives. It has the potential to elevate what you experienced in the mall into something really great. If your tech works.

One suspects that the game designers, used to the snazzy hardware and network set-ups of the average Assassin’s Creed player, didn’t think hard enough about the mobile experience. The WiFi inside 878 AD and the shopping mall that houses it isn’t good enough for easy downloads; only one of our group of three managed to get the app onto her phone. But her coverage then wasn’t good enough to follow us around the suggested route. After multiple frustrations we finally ended up at the cathedral when the app stubbornly insisted we were at the Bishop’s Palace. The mobile experience only works if you’re standing where the app wants you to be. So we gave up. This is one of those tickets that’s good for a year, however, so I downloaded the app onto my own phone once I got home and plan to try it again sometime in the near future.

So … five stars for fun, for kid appeal and for design. What were the drawbacks, other than tech?

If you have a basic grounding in the Anglo-Saxons already, you’re not going to learn much. And, honestly, I’m not talking about people who’d make 9th century England their specialist subject on Mastermind. If you watched The Last Kingdom and had a brief nose around the Anglo-Saxon galleries at either the British Museum or the Ashmolean, everything here is going to be familiar territory.

One of my companions, who is unusually well-versed on the topic, was particularly irked that almost all of the illustrated figures depicted in the displays were swarthy brunettes, looking more like stereotypical Southern Europeans than the famously broad, blonde and Germanic Angles and Saxons. I hadn’t noticed it but once he pointed it out it was quite irritating. All we could think of was that ethnically Vikings and Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have looked that different, but this is entertainment, so did they alter the look of the latter to create dramatic contrast? All those long dead Aelfstans, Æðelfriðs and Eadwulfs must be rolling in their graves. 

My biggest frustration, however, is that the marketing probably promised more than 878 AD delivered. Words like “experience” and “digital”, combined with the creativity of Ubisoft and some great graphics in their ad campaign left me expecting something a lot more high tech. There were a lot more text-heavy information panels than I was expecting from the positioning. I thought I might be donning a virtual reality headset, walking through projections or at least getting to play some gamified learning experiences. That may be the intention of the app, but it’s certainly not what you get inside part one. 

It is, however, early days. My post-visit research suggests this was a trial, and success could lead to bigger and better things. The experience has won creative and tourism awards. There was a steady stream of people coming through on the wet Sunday we decided to check it out. As someone who’s worked in Tech for my whole career, I know the high-end experience I imagined would have cost many times more than what they stood up here. Maybe something more sophisticated is to come. I’d love to see Winchester end up with an Anglo-Saxon version of the Jorvik Viking Experience in York.

Meanwhile, if I win the lottery I will be the benefactor behind a Jane Austen experience to fill up some retail space in the Basingstoke’s struggling Festival Place. Though I’m not sure there’s a logical computer gaming partner for that one. Assassin’s Creed: The Bennet Sisters seems unlikely. But if Pride and Prejudice with Zombies can work, who knows?

Winchester, Kyoto and Tolkien combine for the perfect date night

Your sense of distance changes depending on your surroundings.

Growing up in St. Louis, pretty much every activity (including school) was half an hour away by car. Life was much the same in Dallas. Weekends regularly included two- or three-hour drives to local points of interest, and we thought nothing of a 300-mile weekend road trip to Chicago.

When I first started working in England, I brought that attitude with me. My first assignment came with a company car and a credit card for unlimited fuel. I used it. More than 500 miles a weekend wasn't unusual as I worked through every significant stately home, charming village, ruined abbey and dramatic landscape in reach.

More than 20 years on, and living permanently in the UK for 15, I've embraced a more British attitude. Infrastructure and expense are two culprits. Going anywhere in this country usually means sitting in traffic that will make the journey twice as long as it should be. Once you get there, parking will be hard to find, perilous to fit your car into and ridiculously expensive, and fuel is pricey. None of which, however, should deter me from weekend jaunts to our county town of Winchester, just 23 miles away.

Every time I go, I think to myself that I should go more. After this weekend, I'm making more of an effort to move our occasional "movie date nights" there. Winchester's Everyman Cinema is a marvellously sophisticated way to consume a film, and Kyoto Kitchen has been reviewed as one of the best Japanese restaurants in the country.

Each of the 28 Everyman cinemas in the UK is different, because they like to give new purpose to historic old buildings, but I think the ethos across all of them is the same. Intimate and sophisticated, they're more like some mogul's private screening room than a modern cinema. The manager gives a personal welcome and introduction to each film. Premium seats are oversized armchairs and sofas, and the lobby is a cocktail bar. They even deliver freshly-made pizzas to the seats. Clearly, this appeals to a rather niche target market: the pre-film advertising was for Sipsmith Gin, Hermes scarves and Green and Black chocolate. The only drawback is availability. With just two screens (in Winchester) rotating an handful of films, plus theatrical, operatic and ballet live broadcasts, you need to work to their schedule and booking in advance is usually a requirement.

We were there for Tolkien, the new biopic looking at how the youth of the master of epic literature shaped his writing. The difference between the mainstream reviewers' reactions (lukewarm to aggressively negative) and ours (highly positive) shows why I pay little attention to professional critics. I am clearly not their target market. Most of them griped about the film lacking daring or innovation, or how it was too pedestrian in its pacing. I saw an old-fashioned (in the best possible way) tale of love and friendship, and of dreams overcoming adversity. Set ... aside from the expectedly grim WW1 bits ... in a particularly easy-on-the-eye bit of English history. If you're a fan of Downton Abbey, or that elegiac twilight of British Empire, this film is for you.

The lush Arts and Crafts interiors, in fact, were almost a character in their own right. As well as I know that stylistic movement, and the tales of Middle Earth, I had never put two and two together.  Tolkien spent his childhood surrounded by a cultural zeitgeist that celebrated myth, legend and fairy tale. Of course that influenced his writing. If you know anything about the professor's life, the other influences ... the horrors of industrial Birmingham after a childhood in the countryside, the majesty of Wagner, the nightmare and loss of WWI ... won't be a surprise. But it's great to see them put together into a story both sad and joyous and, ultimately, inspiring.

Afterwards, it was a short walk through Winchester's picturesque Georgian and Victorian streets (Tolkien would have approved) to the Kyoto Kitchen.

This small (no more than 40 covers) restaurant in the repurposed ground floor of an Edwardian house in a row just off the high street was considered one of the best Japanese restaurants in the country by the late, great critic A.A. Gill. (I often quibbled with his film reviews, but almost never with his much-missed food writing.) It's also been awarded a plate in the Michelin-guide, one step below the star system. Kyoto Kitchen has, therefore, been on our "must do" list for years but, embarrassingly, we never managed to make it there. Now that we have, I suspect we'll be back soon.

The menu features a broad range of sushi, sashimi and tempura, plus main courses like grilled black cod, duck breast with raspberry teriyaki sauce and lamb chops with white miso. Thus you can assemble your meal as you wish: feast on raw fish, graze on a succession of small plates or assemble a more traditional European three courses. Since it was our first visit, we left ourselves in the kitchen's hands and went for the chef's menu. This featured a procession of nine exquisite plates, all shared between us, for the astonishing price of £34.95 per person. Here's another reason to love Winchester. I haven't seen a tasting menu in a Michelin-noted restaurant inside the M25 for any less than £70 in years. But even outside of London, we'd have been likely to spend as much at the functional, food-court style sushi place in our local mall. Kyoto Kitchen is a remarkable bargain.

We liked every dish, but thought some were particularly stellar. Tori Kara Agè combine the moreishness and comfort of chicken nuggets with gourmet spicing and light-touch frying. This is why panko bread crumbs exist. Their tempura is excellent, though don't dawdle. Every second it cools is a step away from perfection. In a world where sushi and sashimi have become commonplace lunch take-aways, this was a reminder of the vast differences you can find in fish. Itsu's boxes are excellent, but Kyoto Kitchen's sashimi was noticeably different: more delicate, yet at the same time more packed with flavour. We were less keen on the ume-shiso roll, where we thought the sea bass was overwhelmed by the shiso leaf and plum dust, but we appreciated the gourmet twist. Mochi ... glutinous rice parcels filled with azuki bean paste ... were far better than their description and opened my eyes to the fact that desserts may be my greatest leap into the unknown when we explore Japan later this year.

The restaurant decor says Japanese with a sparse elegance: light wooden floors, black ebony-style chairs, white tablecloths graced with an exquisite variety of pottery and kimonos and obi (wide belts) hanging on the walls. More essential to the properly Japanese experience is the staff. I've written before of the odd-but-typical experience of dining in London where the staff doesn't match the cuisine. Polish waitresses serving up Scandinavian, Australians presenting gourmet French, etc. While I don't have any problem with this, it certainly adds to the authenticity when the people taking care of you come from the same place as the recipes. Especially when your lead waitress takes the time to give you sightseeing tips from her home town and teach you some new Japanese words. We have now, usefully, mastered "oishī" with a big smile. That means "tasty". I suspect I'll be using it a lot when we reach Japan, and predict a few more practice sessions at Kyoto Kitchen in the mean time.

It is, after all, only 25 minutes away. And now, having scouted out exactly how far Kyoto Kitchen is from the train station ... just one stop past our own ... we can make the next trip by public transport, freeing us up for the matching 5-cup sake menu for an additional £20. Yes, that's right. A Michelin "plate" chef's menu, five courses with matching alcohol flight for less than £55. Londoners, eat your hearts out. Winchester is where it's at.

10 reasons Winchester Cathedral outshines its rivals

Thanks to an impressive spire, a famous Constable painting, a copy of the Magna Carta and convenient positioning near Stonehenge, tourists flock to Salisbury Cathedral. The same can't be said for its near neighbour Winchester, which lies 25 miles east. (And is also the cathedral town for my part of the world). It's a real shame, as Winchester Cathedral is one of the great treasures of England in art, architecture, famous associations and great stories. Yet I know many locals who've never set foot inside the place, much less foreign tourists.

Like most of the great English cathedrals, you'll find stunning gothic architecture, an impressive choir, fascinating monuments and enthusiastic tour guides happy to show it all to you. (I've done the tour three times now with different guides, and I learn new things from each of them.) Here are 10 things that make Winchester Cathedral unique. Reasons why you, whether local or tourist, should invest the  time and money (£7.50, less for concessions) to take a proper wander around this treasure house.

Jane Austen
Cross the border into North Hampshire and the signs proudly tell you you're entering Jane Austen country. The great author lies buried inside the cathedral, an exceptional honour at the time even if she was already a well-known author. It's thought that family members with church connections pulled strings to get her here, and to place a prominent grave stone in the north aisle. Ironically, it makes no mention of her literary contributions. The glowing description of a genteel lady could apply to any of her characters, but gives no credit to their creator. A large and lavish brass plaque on the wall nearby, installed by her Victorian-era fans, addresses the oversight. You'll often see flowers here left by today's followers. There's a small exhibit here, too, that explains her connection to this part of the county.

William Walker
Like many Christian churches, Winchester took over what had been a pagan sacred space. Fine idea on the PR front, but a poor choice for construction when the sacred ground is a spring in a marsh. You can see the results best at the very back of the building, where parts of the floor undulate like the damp meadow that would have originally been here. At the turn of the 20th century, the foundations were so compromised that large sections of the cathedral were at risk. Enter William Walker, who spent six years in a primitive diving suit, working under water, in the dark, to haul bags of cement under the building to underpin the foundations. You owe your ability to visit this place to him; give thanks at his small but poignant memorial.

The crypt
Walker might have firmed up the foundations, but the sacred spring is still there and the cathedral crypt floods regularly. Modern custodians have made a feature of this. When it's covered in water (which is usually, in the winter and spring) you can stand at the gate and peer into the quiet, dignified Romanesque space where a single figure by modern sculptor Anthony Gormley is contemplating water held in his hands. It's ghostly, solemn and magnificent. When it's dry down here, there's other modern sculpture to check out. It works well against the ancient, austere backdrop.

The font
The cathedral's baptismal font is a rare survival from the 11th century. According to their web site, only 10 others of this time period exist in the whole country, and this is probably the best. In comparison with the typical gothic style of most cathedrals, the Romanesque carving here seems otherworldly and brutal. It conjures pictures of invading Vikings or Middle Earth. It's also very beautiful, its highly-polished black marble showing the story of St. Nicholas giving bags of gold to three sisters to keep them from descending to prostitution. Look at the round-arched building in the background to get a glimpse of what the cathedral probably looked like when the font was first installed.

Pre-Raphaelite stained glass
Equally rare is pre-Raphaelite stained glass. You know this artistic style, even if you don't think you do. Late Victorian beauties with pouty lips and billowing hair, generally in historical settings. Lush patterns of flora and fauna. Knights in shining armour. As the industrial age approached, William Morris and his set created a decorative style that denied modernity. Love it or hate it, it's still all around England, from the high culture of museums to the common mugs in kitchen cabinets. But I've never seen it in windows. Which is a shame, because the lush, fairy-tale quality suits them well. And is far more memorable than the usual heavy-handed Victorian re-creations of medieval originals. Go to the Epiphany Chapel to see these four windows by Edward Burne-Jones. They're bible stories, but they look more like scenes lifted from an Arthurian romance.

Chantry chapels
Most of the great cathedrals have these ornate churches-within-churches, but I think Winchester's are
some of the best and ... thanks to careful restoration ... in the best shape. Sometimes built between columns, sometimes free-standing, these towering enclosures are masterpieces of gothic architecture and stone carving. The tomb of the person who commissioned the chapel is usually in the middle; he bought this space and endowed the monks to say mass here daily to speed his soul to heaven. William of Wykeham's has been recently restored: the exterior stone glows golden, inside an astonishingly lifelike statue contemplates an exquisite blue and white gothic vault. Behind the main altar, there's the delicious irony of Cardinal Henry Beaufort ... you're not likely to forget his rank, since he managed the tricky task of lying down for eternity without taking off his wide-brimmed cardinal's hat ... entombed within sight of the monument to the woman he condemned to death. We know her as Joan of Arc. Around the corner, modern craftsmen showed off their skill by re-creating the statues on Bishop Fox's chapel so perfectly you'd never know they weren't the Tudor originals. Look out for St. George. His face is that of a local boy who died in World War I, making this a touching double memorial.

Burial place of kings
Winchester was the capital of Anglo-Saxon England, and most of the kings of that era are buried here. For years, their bones lay in ornate mortuary boxes perched atop the choir. They've currently been removed to the Lady Chapel, which is closed off and has been turned into a laboratory for DNA testing. There's not much to see now. But the results of the scientific work will undoubtedly make a great story, and the re-internment will be something to see.

The Winchester Bible
The largest surviving English bible of the 12th century, Winchester's version is so big that each cow vellum page required the skin of an entire animal. You can probably see better medieval illuminations in museums, but there's something special about getting up close to one in the setting for which it was created. The book is on display in its own pavilion in the north transept, and there are rarely many people here. So you can put your nose to the glass and really study the beautiful calligraphy and the lush illustrations, with vivid colours gained from precious materials like ground lapis lazuli and gold leaf. Only one spread is available for display at any one time, but they turn the pages occasionally to reward repeat visitors.

Pay once, get in all year
Save your ticket and your £7.50 investment allows you to explore for another 12 months. Taking the free tours as often as you wish, or simply popping in to look at one thing more closely.

Winchester itself
The town was just named the best place to live in Britain (story here), something that will come as no surprise as you walk around. It's a stately, dignified market town with plenty of views that haven't changed much since Jane Austen was here. There are other tourist sights (most notably the great hall of the old castle, the Westgate of the old city walls and a working water mill) and good shopping that includes a decent number of independent boutiques. It's become a bit of a foodie haven, with a collection of good restaurants and a sprawling farmer's market on the second and final Sunday of every month.