It’s all about sharing little bits behind the scenes

WALKING Tours In The UK started offering guides around Glasgow in early 2017, and the company now operates three daily tours almost all year round as well as a number of private walks in the city.

The daily tours consist of: a City Centre tour; Street Art Tour; a Charles Rennie Mackintosh tour and a Wee Walk & A Whisky tour. Added to that are the company’s private tours in the form of its Dark Side evening waking tour, West End Tour, Film Fanatics Tour and LGBTQ+ History Tour.

Over the past few years the firm has expanded to now operate in Edinburgh, Stirling, St Andrews, Inverness, Oban, Aberdeen, South Queensferry, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds as well as Glasgow.

Co-founder Jenny Benson said they were keen to “show people the value in the places they used as stopgaps”.

Ms Benson said: “The realisation that Edinburgh was the core of tourism in Scotland, with no daily history walking tours in other places in Scotland, became apparent very quickly.

“In 2017 when we started you could do 100 walking tours in Edinburgh if you wanted, but you couldn’t do that anywhere else.

“Also, a lot of tourists use places as a base to explore elsewhere, i.e. Inverness for the NC500, Stirling just for its castle and then moving on elsewhere. We wanted to show people the value in the places they used as stopgaps.

“We had no idea if this idea of sharing Scotland’s smaller towns and cities would work – but it did.

“We launched Inverness, Stirling and St Andrews in 2019 and instantly had people from all over the world on our tours.

“It’s about the best coffee, the best places to eat, the little insider’s knowledge to a place that you can’t find in a guide book – that’s what we’re about sharing.”