FEATURES: TOURS LED BY GUIDES WITH EXPERIENCE OF HOMELESSNESS – PAGE 11
York is one of a handful of cities pioneering tours led by guides with experience of homelessness. Sarah Wilson joins one of the Invisible Cities groups to find out more.
IT’S A chilly February afternoon in York – a rare quiet moment in the city – when tour guide Vicki McPhail commences her sightseeing tour with a striking line: “If it wasn’t for Guy Fawkes, I wouldn’t be here today”.
Naturally, Vicki has the life of Yorkborn Guy Fawkes to thank for her hourand-a-half of historical tour material, but her real meaning – as I’m about to find out – runs much deeper than this.
I’m braving the cold with two other locals for a walking tour that stands out from the crowd in York’s saturated sightseeing market. Vicki’s tour forms part of the “Invisible Cities” network; a social enterprise that trains those with experience of homelessness in tour guiding. All of the profits are given back to guides in the form of wages, development and other necessary support.
Tapping into an increasing consumer demand for “alternative” tourism experiences, Invisible Cities offer themed guided tours that often (though not always) intertwine personal and local histories, highlighting both the lesser-trodden “invisible” areas of cities alongside the oft-invisible experiences of the homeless people increasingly populating their streets.
Now running in four UK cities – with Cardiff soon joining the ranks – Invisible Cities is transforming tourism and turning lives around in the process. Running for over six months in York, the scheme is finally paving the way for the most economically disadvantaged residents to share in the city’s vast touristic wealth.
The idea of training homeless people in tour guiding came to founder Zakia Moulaoui after visiting Athens in late 2015 and seeing sellers of Big Issueequivalent magazines also offering guided tours to visitors.
Having worked for several years with the multi-national Homeless World Cup Foundation, she’d observed that “no matter where homeless people had come from, they faced the same stigma”, resulting in a “heartbreaking” lack of confidence among homeless people.
Like selling the Big Issue, she believed that tour guiding could be an excellent way of rebuilding this lacking confidence while also developing useful transferable skills for future work. The first tours began running in Edinburgh in 2016, and have since started up in Glasgow, Manchester and York. Since the organisation “can’t be everywhere”, says Zakia, Invisible Cities usually partners up with local organisations who take charge of running the tours.
Kenny Lieske, head of York partner
Good Organisation, sees the tour guiding scheme as tackling a lesserdiscussed facet of being homeless: a lack of “voice and representation” in a society that so often closes its eyes and ears to the problem. Tourism experiences have rarely, for obvious reasons, focused on the lives of the less fortunate - and where they have, the result has often been exploitative “poverty safaris” like the favela tours embarked upon by wealthy travellers in South America. “Poverty porn”, says Kenny, is strictly avoided by Invisible Cities and Good Organisation, with guides under no obligation to share any personal information on their tours which they develop based entirely on their own interests, in tandem with a volunteer mentor.
Indeed, it’s not Vicki’s own personal history that dominates her tour of York, but the quality of information and enthusiasm for the subject matter that stands out. As we retrace the steps of the young Guy Fawkes - and other reticent Catholics - through the cobbled streets of York, Vicki transports the group back in time with eloquence and ease, pointing out nooks and crannies that even us seasoned York locals had never noticed before.
It was her passionate interest in the history of Fawkes and the Elizabethan/ Jacobean period that first drew Vicki to York. By coincidence, she later met her partner in the Guy Fawkes pub in her 50s, moving from Scotland to be with him after a split from her ex. After gesturing to the pub on High Petergate, Vicki ushers us into St Michael le Belfry Church in the shadow of the Minster, where Guy Fawkes was christened as an infant. It’s here in the quiet pews of the church that Vicki segues from Fawkes’ life to her own, opening up about the heartbreaking chain of events that led to her homelessness.
After ending up in a hostel for the homeless, Vicki was then diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer at age 58. The illness not only resulted in months of physically gruelling treatment but also shocking institutional discrimination as staff barred her from the hospital’s hotel floor for chemotherapy patients after discovering her homeless status. Against all odds, Vicki’s cancer eventually went into remission. Had her fascination with Guy Fawkes not brought her to York, she might never have had the scan that first identified the cancer. What’s more, it was this special interest that led her to discover the Invisible Cities scheme - something she describes as a “godsend” in her life. Guy Fawkes, it seems, saved her life in a multitude of ways.
Vicki tells her story confidently and candidly, and it’s clear that no hand has been forced in her decision to share it with the group, who are at several points visibly moved by her words. It’s common, says Kenny, for guides to open up once they become more confident on their tours.
York, like many other cities, is struggling to provide affordable housing and sees rough sleepers almost every night. Yet not everyone was so keen on the idea of Invisible Cities launching in York - with responses demonstrating the very discrimination that makes life so difficult for homeless people. “Initially when it was proposed you saw people making really vile comments...things like ‘imagine the smell’, or ‘who wants to see a dumpster where someone eats’”, said Kenny. “A lot of the other local tour companies were a little sceptical of us initially. I think they thought that we would be taking homeless people straight out of doorways and putting them in front of tourists, posing a reputational risk to the city.”
After reassurance that guides would be comprehensively trained, however, many of these companies came around to the idea, with some even offering their own training sessions for guides.
But these damaging stereotypes are precisely the reason why it’s so important for Invisible Cities to exist. Kenny says the tours “challenge stereotypes...by the nature of the content”. “Homelessness is a situation, it’s not a characteristic that defines you.”.
Our own tour ends in the gardens of the quaint Merchant Adventurers Hall on Fossgate with a final, fitting Guy-Fawkes-related coincidence. The original site of his old school, says Vicki, became the hostel where she was obliged to live in during her period of homelessness.
“Though I was going further for my chemo than he was for school”, she says, “it turns out we went home to the same spot every day.”