Unpacked: S3, E4: The London Tour Company Where Homeless People Are Your Guides

AFAR

The issue of homelessness—or being unhoused, or facing housing scarcity—isn’t something we often talk about when it comes to travel, unless it’s in a negative sense. In this episode, however, we’re going to meet a London-based tour company that’s working on bringing homelessness into the tourism narrative.   It’s called Unseen Tours, a nonprofit founded in 2010 by Jayni Gudka. It offers London tours that touch on many of the city’s most popular sites and neighborhoods—Soho, King’s Cross—with a twist: They’re led by individuals who were once homeless. But the tours are not poverty tourism. They’re history-rich, city-focused walking excursions led by people with a very special kind of knowledge.  Read the full transcript here: https://rebrand.ly/i5bqld2  Discover more episodes of the Unpacked by AFAR podcast here:  https://link.chtbl.com/AFARYouTubeUnpacked  ---- CONNECT WITH AFAR Afar.com is a digital and print magazine that publishes travel tips, guides, news, and stories: https://www.afar.com  Get updates on the latest articles, travel news, and more from AFAR by signing up for the AFAR newsletter: https://afar.com/newsletters  Follow AFAR on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AfarMedia Follow AFAR on Twitter: https://twitter.com/afarmedia Follow AFAR on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afarmedia Follow AFAR on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/afarmedia Subscribe to the podcast: https://link.chtbl.com/AFARYouTubeUnpacked

Transcript

00:00 Hey everyone, and welcome to the third season of Unpacked, a podcast by afar.

00:04 I'm Aislinn, and as you can probably tell by this giant microphone in front of my face,

00:08 I host the show. Every week on the podcast, we unpack a different tricky topic in travel,

00:15 and this week is no exception. This is Unpacked.

00:29 I'm Aislinn Green, and this is Unpacked, the podcast that unpacks one tricky topic in travel

00:33 each week. And this week, we are exploring the intersection of travel and housing deprivation,

00:40 or as many refer to it, homelessness. It is a very tricky subject, but one that is close to my heart.

00:47 I have a close family member who has experienced homelessness, and I live in the Bay Area, which,

00:54 as you may know, has struggled under the weight of a certain narrative around the topic. In fact,

01:00 you may have seen recently that a TikTok star cut his trip to San Francisco short,

01:04 citing several issues, including safety. I'm not going to go deeply into the issue other than to

01:10 share my perspective, and that is that many parts of the city feel so alive and vibrant and safe,

01:16 although I do challenge us all to explore how and when and why we use the word safe. I know that it

01:22 can be scary and it can be uncomfortable when we encounter people who are altered or grappling with

01:28 mental illness or simply without the comforts that I know that I take for granted. But when we as

01:33 travelers avoid these feelings of discomfort, we're missing out on a larger story. There are

01:38 larger systemic issues at play here, and we're not going to solve them with travel. But let's at

01:43 least have the conversation. And that's what we're doing in this episode. We're going to meet a

01:47 walking tour company that is bringing homelessness into the tourism narrative. Our guide is Rachel

01:53 Parsons, a multimedia journalist and host of the solo travel series, The Peregrine Dame.

01:58 She splits her time between LA and London,

02:02 and that city is where she came across the groundbreaking work of Unseen Tours.

02:12 Here at St. Giles in the fields, this was literally a field, and it was where people

02:21 came and they were hung, drawn, and quartered. For my money, there's no better way to spend a

02:27 couple of hours in a new city than a good walking tour, especially one that reminds me I'm lucky to

02:34 be alive in an era where I'm unlikely to be publicly eviscerated. I love a little history.

02:40 He became a doctor for Henry VIII simply because he was found with three women. Because, of course,

02:48 you know, he'd become a monk, and monks aren't supposed to be with women. A little architecture.

02:58 St. Patrick's Church was no, not a church. It was actually a house. It was called Carlisle House.

03:06 There's another Carlisle House over there, but this was a slightly dodgier one.

03:12 And London is chock full of them. Not dodgy houses, though there are still plenty of those around.

03:19 I mean walking tours, food tours, pub tours, architecture tours, history tours, street art

03:25 tours, and of course the ubiquitous Jack the Ripper tours in the once gritty and dark East End.

03:32 But I'm in the bright lights and polished, if commercialized, refinement of the West End.

03:37 I'm joining guide Nick Shaw on one of her tours of the Soho and St. Giles districts.

03:43 Soho is London's notorious nightlife hub. Opulent theaters and flat-faced Victorian brick buildings

03:51 squeeze narrow sidewalks, forcing pedestrians onto equally narrow streets, the pavement of

03:57 which covers most of the old cobbles. Once a den of iniquity, today Soho and St. Giles are known

04:03 more for cheesy clubs and expensive restaurants than public executions. London's queer community

04:09 also has deep roots in Soho. Nick stops in front of a door with an ornate knocker on a quiet

04:15 pedestrian path called Flitcroft Street. In 1935, it was the door to Billy's, a gay members club.

04:23 Homosexual behavior being illegal, Billy's and the caravan club not far away were under heavy

04:29 secret police surveillance. This is just two. Goodness knows how many there were.

04:37 And they were open for about a year and then the government came along and said,

04:47 "This is Satan's work. We have to close these places." And they did. What followed were aggressive

04:57 raids by the metropolitan police and lengthy trials and sentences for scores of customers

05:03 and club owners. We're all contemplating historical social injustice when Nick,

05:08 who's been leading tours since 2018, takes this moment to seg into some history of a

05:15 personal nature. The only reason that I got a decent home was because I was in hostels, but then

05:27 I was put in this charity called Broadway, put me in with a girl, woman, sorry, who was,

05:40 just come out of rehab. She'd been on heroin. If this seems a bit non sequitur for a history

05:52 walking tour, it's because Nick is a guide with unseen tours. It's a social enterprise

05:58 in London that hires people who were previously homeless. Nick Shaw spent about 12 years as one

06:04 of the thousands of hidden homeless in this city, bouncing from hostel to hostel. Janie Goodka,

06:10 the organization's CEO, tells me that unseen tours guides have lived through a range of homelessness,

06:16 including living on the streets, known in Britain as sleeping rough. One note on the sound. Janie

06:24 has agreed to meet me on a particularly miserable rainy day, even for London, and we've had to tuck

06:29 away in a noisy coffee shop. So our tour guides, some have been rough sleeping in London for many

06:38 years. Some have not experienced that form of homelessness, but they've experienced hidden

06:43 homelessness. They may have had hospital stays, which left them homeless afterwards. We didn't

06:50 have somewhere to go after this, Denton Hospital. They may have slept in cars when they were

06:58 displaced from wherever they were staying, but they may have had like relationships break down,

07:03 and that may have led them to being homeless, staying in hostels, couch surfing sometimes.

07:08 So it does vary quite a bit, and I think that's something we're keen to raise awareness about

07:14 through our tours. To be clear, this is not poverty tourism, and unseen tours does not

07:20 hire guides who are still homeless. Instead, Janie says if someone comes to them who's unhoused,

07:26 the first order of business is to work with partner organizations to get a roof over their

07:30 head before training starts. On her tour, Nick shares how she finally got into stable housing.

07:36 Sometime around 2010, she can't quite remember, and that ended a dozen years of living one night

07:43 to the next. She had help from social workers before finding unseen tours, and I will get back

07:49 to that. But to understand her path out of homelessness, it's important to understand

07:55 her journey into it. Before the tour, Nick invited me to her apartment, where we can talk

08:00 away from the noise of the street. It's in a neat public housing complex with a lush green courtyard

08:06 and common garden on the edge of St. Giles. Her living room is overflowing with history books.

08:12 There are stacks on the shelves, on the floor, on the tables. The walls are a vivid deep green

08:19 and coordinate with Nick's green jacket, green jewelry, and green fingernail polish. At 67 and

08:27 sober, Nick says she knows no one would look at her and think she'd been homeless. You're always

08:33 going to get people think, "Oh, if you're now homeless, look at them. They're just grounded."

08:40 But people don't understand the situation. They really haven't a clue how things can change,

08:49 and this is what I kind of start my tour saying. You never know. You just don't know what's gonna

08:57 happen in life. You start, everything's fine and lovely, and you've got this and you've got that.

09:04 Things don't always work out. Nick was born in 1956 in northwest England. She became a nurse,

09:14 got married young, and had two children. From the outside, everything looked fine.

09:19 And also people say they're fine, don't they? "Oh, I'm fine. How are you, Rachel? Oh, I'm fine."

09:28 Do you know what it stands for? ****ed up, insecure, nervous, and emotional. That is what

09:35 it stands for, and it's true quite often, but we all kind of got a mix smelling up this.

09:41 In Nick's case, the smile couldn't hide the bruises. Her husband was physically and

09:46 psychologically abusive. She eventually left him. Time passed, and she met someone new,

09:53 and for a number of years found love and stability. She was still nursing and studying

09:58 criminology part-time. Then one day she came home from work and found her partner dead.

10:04 Painful years of past trauma and new loss manifested as mental illness,

10:10 and eventually alcohol addiction. "Really things just fell apart. My sister said come and live with

10:19 me, and then he stood it. So I went to live with her, but my head was screwed." But back then,

10:29 Nick says, her sister in London couldn't cope and didn't understand the depth of Nick's problems.

10:35 She asked Nick to move out. With nowhere to go, Nick found a bed in a hostel that catered to the

10:42 down-and-out, homeless, and people in the throes of addiction. She continued to work as a nurse.

10:48 In fact, she held paying jobs and volunteer positions throughout her time unhoused,

10:52 though she says much of her income went to alcohol.

10:56 Nick Shaw was 42 when she moved into that hostel and became homeless.

11:02 "But, say homeless, but then there's lost, feeling lost, just feeling lost.

11:11 It can be quite different. I feel like I was homeless a lot longer than I was,

11:18 really, simply because I didn't have my own place, you know, just a cool mind."

11:26 She pauses and looks around her green sitting room. "So this is my first ever,

11:34 I created my own home. This is my first own bed, first own floor, you know, it's all these little

11:45 things. It's about something being your own." Helping guides reclaim that sense of ownership

11:54 in their professional lives as well is a cornerstone of Unseen Tours' mission.

11:59 But it's also about representation and visibility in the tourism business,

12:04 an industry that does its best to render people living through homelessness invisible.

12:08 As CEO Janie Goodka points out, who better to illustrate the fullness of lived experience in

12:15 a place? "If they've been sleeping on the streets, they know the streets better than anyone.

12:20 They know the interesting personalities better than anyone." And they know the stories they

12:27 want to tell. Janie says staff and volunteers work with guides on things like building confidence and

12:33 public speaking, but are careful not to interfere with the essence of the guide's story. "So we're

12:38 really keen to make sure that the people that we work with are able to share their stories

12:46 in their own voices, without putting words in their mouth, without telling them what they should

12:49 be saying and how they should be portraying homelessness, because it's their individual

12:53 experiences, their own unique experiences. And of course, everyone experiences homelessness very

12:58 differently." Which is why each guide shares as much or as little of their background as they

13:04 choose. And that brings me back to Nyx. 99% of her two-hour tour is history and culture,

13:11 but she shares her transition out of homelessness to highlight the holes in the safety net.

13:17 Remember, she'd been sleeping in hostels for about 12 years when her social workers found

13:22 her roommate and put them in public housing. The woman's name was Lana. "She'd been on

13:29 heroin. She'd been out of rehab for four weeks. I joined her. I've never done drugs. Drink, yeah.

13:39 Drugs, no." Lana quickly fell back into her heroin addiction. Things got dangerous when

13:47 acquaintances of Lana's started coming around the apartment at all hours trying to kick in the door.

13:52 Nyx caseworkers knew they had to get her out. They helped Nyx into an apartment of her own.

13:59 "And Lana has not been seen for 11 years, so she's probably dead. And what she said,

14:10 it was only because of Lana, the situation with Lana, they got me out, which is awful.

14:22 It seems I was the last person to see her." Although things turned out in Nyx's favour,

14:29 it could have easily gone differently because homelessness in London has only increased in

14:34 the last decade, straining the city's support system. Liz McCulloch is policy and research

14:40 manager at St Mungo's, a non-profit homeless services organisation. "The most recent annual

14:46 data we have showed that there were 10,053 people sleeping rough in London, so that was a 21%

14:55 increase from the previous year." That's more than 10,000 people sleeping on the street.

15:00 But like Nyx, thousands more don't show up in the numbers. With hidden homelessness, Liz says,

15:06 there's no way to know for sure. "But the problem with hidden homelessness is that it encompasses

15:11 people who basically fall through the gaps of the system. So it's people who are sofa surfing,

15:18 it's people who are maybe are sleeping in a secure place, maybe in a squat at night,

15:25 and then during the day, they maybe ride public transport. And so these groups aren't being

15:30 necessarily picked up as a specific group by statistics. We need to think about the hidden

15:35 homeless group in order to effectively tackle rough sleeping, because these are essentially

15:39 people who are on the verge of sleep rough."

15:44 There's little that tourism professionals, and frankly a lot of travellers, are more allergic

15:58 to than the sight of people sleeping on the street, especially in a glamorous destination

16:03 such as London, where tourism rakes in tens of billions of dollars a year. "In our experience,

16:09 people who've experienced homelessness are usually excluded from the tourism narrative.

16:14 So if we think back to the London Olympics, or the royal wedding of Harry and Meghan,

16:21 people who were homeless were displaced from the areas in which these events were taking place,

16:26 because London or the UK in general didn't want to be seen as having this problem of homelessness.

16:33 When the world was watching." And it's not just London, it happens everywhere. I've witnessed it

16:38 firsthand in cities as far-flung as Los Angeles, Rio and Manila, when a large sporting event

16:44 president or pope appears. "And so obviously at Unseen Tours we think this is a missed opportunity,

16:49 and it's a shame, because the insights that people have when they've been rough sleeping,

16:53 or just been homeless in a community, like the new perspectives and the different

17:00 quirky facts that they have about a community, just not something that

17:04 are usually seen in walking tours or in the tourism industry." So Nick and her colleagues

17:10 understand the multi-layered context of their tour sites like few others. They also have a firm grasp

17:17 of factual history. In Soho, Nick leads us to one of her favorite stops, Soho Square. She points out

17:25 number 21, which she says in the 19th century contributed to Soho's infamous reputation for

17:31 naughtiness. "They bought this place and they made it into the Machiko town, or the White House,

17:43 or various other names. It was a brothel." They were high society dominatrix Teresa Barkley and

17:54 a business partner. She's said to have invented the Barkley horse, a BDSM whipping rack. The upper

18:01 crust of society and nobility were willing to pay Barkley handsomely for her absolute discretion

18:07 and her cat o' nine tails. As a letter from one of Teresa's prospective clients makes clear,

18:13 Nick reads it to us. "Pound sterling for the first blood drawn, two pounds sterling if the blood runs

18:21 down to my heels, three pounds sterling if my heels are bathed in blood, four pounds sterling

18:28 if the blood reaches the floor, and five pounds sterling if you succeed in making me lose

18:33 consciousness." "Wow." "Exactly, but I mean if that's what you want, that's what you want."

18:43 Nick's tour is all about history, but Janie says each guide curates their tour based on

18:49 their interests and they have plenty of assistance from staff throughout that preparation.

18:54 "It's a very bespoke process, so we work with the guides on a one-to-one basis. It can take between

19:03 three months to I think 21 months was the longest time to develop one tour." "That was Nick's by the

19:08 way." "But it's their tour and they own it, so it's the stories that they're most passionate about,

19:14 both from their own experiences and the communities around them." A large part of the process is

19:19 providing support services. Nick took nearly two years to create her tour to really learn the

19:25 history of her patch, but also to build the self-assurance needed to get in front of strangers.

19:30 "The challenges that people with experience of homelessness have can vary so much. So some people

19:35 may need some more support with mental health, mental well-being, trauma they may have experienced

19:40 when they were homeless. Some people may have lost their confidence because they felt invisible when

19:45 they were experiencing homelessness. So how can we change that to help someone build up their

19:51 self-confidence, their self-worth, help them with public speaking skills, other skills they may need

19:58 to create their walking tours. But also we find that the people we work with are just fantastic

20:04 storytellers. They have really interesting stories to tell, not just of their own experiences, but

20:09 also stories about London, stories of the community that they live in and they know so well." Since

20:14 Unseen Tours started in 2010, 24 guides have hosted more than 25,000 tourists throughout London.

20:22 The organisation is developing plans to expand to other cities in the UK and abroad.

20:27 Janie says in the end she hopes the tours spark a deeper dialogue between customers and guides.

20:34 "Just to help have conversations about homelessness with people who often just don't

20:39 have a chance to speak about these topics and who may have kind of stereotypes or stigmas that they

20:46 personally associate with homelessness, their own prejudices for example. So having these

20:51 conversations in quite an open, frank manner." For Nick Shaw, her tours are about piercing the

20:58 glitzy veneer of London's West End, especially of those who live in it. "Just don't believe what you

21:06 see. Just because somebody looks okay, people put on such a facade." "In the years that I've been

21:14 travelling to and living in London, I've seen its facade crack as homelessness worsens and the holes

21:20 in the safety net stretch. I've always believed as a traveller I have a responsibility to see the

21:26 full spectrum of a place, warts and all, to understand it in its context. I believe shutting

21:33 my eyes to the ugliest aspects of a place does me and the destination a grave disservice."

21:37 Walking through Soho with our small group, I have a deep sense of admiration for Nick Shaw,

21:44 for the strength it takes to stand in front of total strangers and talk about the worst years

21:49 of her life three times a week, for her willingness to be vulnerable and for her resilience, for her

21:55 insistence on being seen and acknowledged, and compassion for all those she represents who remain

22:02 unseen. And that was Rachel Parsons. We'll link to her work in the show notes as well as to Unseen

22:12 Tours. And when they expand to other cities, we will be sure to let you know. And if you take a

22:18 tour with them, be sure to let us know. Love to know what you think. Next week, we'll be back with

22:23 our first Unpacking episode of the season, this one exploring all things Albuquerque, New Mexico.

22:28 Ready for more unpacking? Visit afar.com and be sure to follow us on Instagram and

22:34 @AfarMedia. If you enjoyed today's exploration, I hope you'll come back for more great stories.

22:41 Subscribing always makes that easy. And be sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast

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22:52 topic for coverage, you can reach out to us at afar.com/feedback or email us at unpacked@afar.com.

22:58 This has been Unpacked, a production of Afar Media. The podcast is produced by Aislinn Green

23:04 and Nikki Galteland. Music composition by Chris Collin. And remember, the world is complicated.

23:11 We're here to help you unpack it. Okay, that was our show. Don't forget to hit like and subscribe

23:21 on your way out. And I'll include a link to the podcast below.

23:24 [Music]

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