Ian Skipper
A man few tourists will have heard of has died this week
His name may be unfamiliar but his achievements will be known. In York he was the driving force behind turning the excavations on the remains found into what became the Jorvik Centre. After that the company he set up, Heritage Projects, which used the skills of those people from the York work was used to promote other tourism work. The Oxford Story, which tells of what it says on the can, was another of his projects as was opening up Oxford Castle. Today, the successor to Heritage Projects, Continuum promotes and invests in attractions like the Canterbury Tales, the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth and Mary King’s Close in Edinburgh.
He began as a car dealer. He built that up, sold it and with the money invested in a number of other industries. It wasn’t until he was in his forties that he used the entrepreneurial skills he had developed to consider turning archaeological digs and heritage sites into tourist ventures.
There are lots of people who set up tourism ideas; there aren’t many who had his skills to turn it into such well known and well visited projects.
Would that we had more.
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