Idea 393 of 500. Cluster 19: Heritage, archives and film
Colombo walking tours through the Pettah, the Fort and Slave Island
The mechanism, from the book
Eight World Heritage Sites and 2,300 years of records, and the country's story is told to the world by other people.
Every idea in cluster 19 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Walk the route twice yourself with a notebook, and write down the stories you can check for each street in the Pettah, the Fort and Slave Island. Then run a free tour for 10 people from a guesthouse and ask each for an honest review and what they would have paid. Their answers give you the price and your first reviews.
- Who pays first
- A visitor with a spare afternoon in Colombo who wants to understand the city and books through a guesthouse or a review site.
- What leaves today
- Colombo's history reaches visitors through foreign guidebooks, if at all; a local guide who tells it straight earns the fee and keeps the story.
The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.
In the book
More from cluster 19
- 381A film-location service: crews, permits, fixers and locations, sold to the studios of India and Europe
- 382Documentary production about the island's own stories, sold to the streaming platforms
- 383A museum shop worthy of the museum, at the National Museum, at Anuradhapura, at Galle
- 384Digitisation of the palm-leaf manuscripts and colonial archives as a paid service to the libraries of the world
- 385Architecture tours of Bawa's buildings with the houses opened by their owners
- 386Heritage-building restoration firms with the skills to work on the forts and the villas
Idea 393 of the 500 in the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? Every one can be started by one person, one family or one small firm.