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HEH lunch tour with Pauline

How do we create the Lunch Tour calendar?

Happy New Year to all our visitors! To start 2023 off, we proudly present our new Lunch Tour Calendar, which outlines all the topics you can learn about during our weekly whistle stop tours at the museum.

By Pieterjan Van Langenhove, Project Manager, Learning Team

Happy New Year to all our visitors! To start 2023 off, we proudly present our new Lunch Tour Calendar, which outlines all the topics you can learn about during our weekly whistle stop tours at the museum.

What are Lunch Tours?

Every Tuesday from 12:15 - 13:00, visitors can join us for a free 45-minute tour of the museum’s exhibition, run by a member of the learning team. Every week presents a new theme, so there’s always something new to discover.

The Lunch Tour is the perfect appetizer to taste what the museum is about - it's a quick way to delve into the various themes and discover more about history. It is as much about the big events as it is about you and I; when we discuss the content with our visitors during a tour; that's the moment the content really comes to life for everyone.

History of the Lunch Tours

Lunch Tours first began at the House of European History in 2018 as an informal programme. Initially they started as general tours of the museum, but since 2019, the team decided to develop a calendar with specific topics instead. Lunch Tours quickly became a fun and unique part of the museum’s offering.

After a short hiatus during COVID, the Lunch Tours returned to the museum in March 2022 -bigger and better than before!

Weekly topics create an opportunity for visitors to delve into the many different stories being told at the museum and see the accompanying objects presented to tell them.

Each month we explore a new theme with a related topic per week. So with 12 themes and 52 topics to plan, the conception and creation of the calendar takes time to develop, with planning starting as early as September.

How is the Lunch Tour calendar created?

To start the process, the Learning and Events Team considers all the planned certainties for the upcoming year.

For example, this year we welcome our new Temporary Exhibition ‘Throwaway’ in the middle of February.

We also wanted to include specific commemorative dates in European history such as the 75th year of the Congress of Europe. As this is an important milestone for European Integration Process, it is a date we wanted to include in the calendar.

Other annual commemorative dates and recurring events throughout the year are also mapped out.

When we finish outlining these specific dates, we look at our visitor’s input. After every Lunch Tour, our visitors fill out a survey so we can continuously improve the programme every year with their valuable feedback. The last question on the survey asks which topic/s visitors would like to see addressed. This input is a goldmine for inspiration!

Through this feedback we discovered many of our visitors want to hear more about Ukraine, but also other topics such as LGBTQ+, gender and environmental topics.

Finally, we review at the previous year’s calendar to see what worked well and what could be included again.

From then the creative process really begins! We combine all topics into a monthly programme to make it coherent - alternating lighter and more complex topics whenever possible.

The Lunch Tours are great way to get to know the museum as a first time visitor but also to learn something specific about a particular topic in an informal, fun and interesting way.

"It was great to learn about European History in a playful way! Thank you for organising this, I definitely recommend it!'  - recent Lunch Tour visitor

We look forward to welcoming all of our visitors to the 2023 Lunch Tours!

View the 2023 weekly themes

Some Fast Facts about Lunch Tours

  • Every Tuesday
  • 12:15 - 13:00
  • English
  • Free of charge
  • No registration needed
  • Meet in the lobby
  • Museum is fully accessible