Published: 22 Oct 2026
St Paul’s Cathedral has renewed its partnership with ATS for another multi-year term. It brings new devices, entirely new tour content and an ATS team running the guide operation on site. It’s the kind of news we’re proudest to share, though not for the reason you might think.
St Paul’s Cathedral has renewed its contract with ATS for 5 years, and this isn’t a like-for-like extension. When the new experience launches in early 2027, visitors will collect a new generation of Focus 3 multimedia guides. They’ll be managed through our WorkSpace platform and carry tour content written and produced from the ground up. Alongside the technology, an ATS team will run the guide operation itself: the desk, the devices and the people who hand them over.
It’s the next chapter in a partnership that began with a competitive tender and has lasted over a decade, with our first guide going into visitors’ hands in September 2015.
Most supplier relationships run on a comfortable assumption that the incumbent holds the advantage. In our experience, it tends to work the other way.
A new supplier is judged on a promise: a pitch, a portfolio and some good intentions. An incumbent is judged on everything that has actually happened. Every busy Saturday in August, every software update, every visitor who asked the way to the crypt. St Paul’s knows exactly what working with us is like, day to day, and that’s what it has chosen to renew.
It’s also why we don’t treat a renewal as a reward for past work. We treat it as a brief. The bar is now whatever we delivered last time, plus everything visitors have come to expect since.
Working with the cathedral’s in-house interpretation team, we set out to do more than walk people around another cathedral interior. The guide was built as a vertical journey, up to the galleries beneath the Dome and down into the crypt, with faith and architecture as the threads running through it.
It brought in fly-through footage of the Dome galleries, zoomable close-ups of Wren’s detail, archive film and expert interviews. The family tour featured an animated phoenix that ‘flew’ around the building, using drone footage captured especially for it. Audio-described and British Sign Language versions were part of the offer from the start, and today the guide is available in nine languages.
For 2015, it was ambitious. It has since spent more than a decade in the hands of visitors at one of the busiest attractions in the country.
The easy option would have been a refresh: new hardware, a tidy-up of the script, a couple of extra languages. St Paul’s wanted something different, and the reason is the audience.
The cathedral is actively reaching out to people who might never have thought of it as a place for them. Sandra Lynes Timbrell, St Paul’s Director of Visitor Engagement, spoke this month about encouraging people “to discover and engage with this historic building in new and exciting ways”. A multimedia guide is one of the most direct tools a site has for doing exactly that. It’s the voice in every visitor’s ear from the moment they step inside.
Writing for new audiences means asking different questions from the ones we asked in 2015. Who is walking through the door for the first time, and what do they need to feel welcome? What does a visitor with forty minutes need, compared with one who has the whole afternoon? Where should the guide lead, and where should it step back and let the building speak for itself?
The new content will tell a broader story. It moves away from a singular focus on Wren and his architectural vision, and places the cathedral's purpose as a living, working church at the heart of the visit. There will be new adult and family tours, each written to do three jobs: guide visitors through each space, lift their gaze to the beauty around them, and explain what the building is actually for. The adult tour will be translated into the cathedral's current languages, with British Sign Language and audio-described versions also planned.
The part of this contract we’re most excited about isn’t on the device at all.
Earlier this year we wrote about the visitor journey as a series of stages, and argued that arrival is where the human element matters most (link: ats-heritage.co.uk/blog/human-vs-digital). The first feeling is a design choice. At St Paul’s, one of the first people many visitors speak to is whoever hands them their guide.
Running that operation ourselves means one team is accountable for the whole experience. That covers the device, the content on it and the conversation at the desk that sets the tone for everything after. It also closes a loop. Visitors’ questions when they collect a guide, and their comments when they return it, are some of the most useful feedback we can get. Now that feedback goes straight to the people writing the content.
“We are delighted to be continuing our partnership with ATS as we develop a new multimedia guide experience for our visitors. This project gives us an exciting opportunity to tell the story of St Paul's in fresh ways, helping more people connect with the Cathedral's history, architecture and its continuing role as a living church in the heart of London. ATS has been an important partner for many years, and we look forward to extending our work together to create an experience that is engaging, accessible and welcoming for all.”
Sandra Lynes Timbrell, Director of Visitor Engagement, St Paul's Cathedral
“Being asked back by a client like St Paul’s is the best endorsement there is. They know exactly what we’re like to work with, on the good days and the difficult ones. We’re treating it as a fresh start, with new stories, new technology and our own team on the floor, because the visitors walking in over the next few years deserve something created for them.”
Spencer Clark, Managing Director, ATS Heritage
We’ve worked with some of our clients for more than fifteen years. What those relationships have in common isn’t that nothing changes. The technology, the stories and the way the operation runs are all allowed to change, while the partnership underneath stays steady.
St Paul’s new guide launches in early 2027, and we’ll share more as the content takes shape.
If you’re thinking about what your own visitor experience should look like in the years ahead, we’d genuinely welcome the conversation. Get in touch below.