Formerly homeless Scots giving tourists unique perspective on city’s communities

Formerly homeless tour guides are giving visitors a unique perspective on the city streets they once called home.

Invisible Cities is a social enterprise that trains people who have experienced homelessness to become tour guides of the places they often know better than anyone else. Edinburgh Live reports that the tours often see the guides sharing their own personal experiences as well as interesting cultural facts.

One Invisible Cities tour guide, Gayle, took 10 American tourists on a walk from Edinburgh’s Waverley Station to Grassmarket where she spun the usual historical yarns — while also pointing out places along the way where the city’s homeless can turn for help.

“This is Carrubber’s and I want to highlight the community work they do right here on the Royal Mile. They do great work for the homeless community,” Gayle said to her attentive audience, pulling up outside the evangelical church on the Royal Mile. Likewise, she paused for some time outside St Columba’s Free Church opposite Tolbooth Kirk.

“This is a place that does a lot to support homeless women,” Gayle said. “About once every three months the Sparkle Sisters [at St Columba’s] sets up haircuts, bra fittings and provides other necessities.”

Gayle is the newest of three formerly homeless tour guides in Edinburgh. Invisible Cities, which was founded in 2016, aims not only to empower and train people experiencing homelessness but also to raise awareness about homelessness through its tours.

Craig Swan, administrative coordinator, says the enterprise wants to change perceptions and break down stigmas around homeless people. He said: “Everybody that we work with has a story and it’s different for everybody.

“No two people are the same, and seeing that side of things from working with Invisible Cities is massive. I think everybody thinks that people who are homeless all have the same problems, and it’s not true at all. Everybody’s got very different stories and very different needs.”

The group of tourists had plenty of questions for Gayle about her life circumstances and about the way Edinburgh copes with social issues like homelessness. The personal questions have taken her some time to get used to, but she said it’s all part of starting the conversation and ending the stigma.

Gayle said: “You do get used to it and build up more of a sort of resilience to [the questions] so that you don’t mind talking about your life. It’s helpful to start a conversation because it’s not something you’d ever just bring up and talk about.

“It helps people see that you can still be homeless and go to work and maybe live in B&B’s or on someone’s sofa or something like that.”

Invisible Cities offers a selection of four themed tours, and Gayle mostly guides the Real Women of Edinburgh tour, which she has constructed herself. Her tour takes guests to the Canongate cemetery where ‘Clarinda’ Agnes Craig’s memorial headstone lies.

Gayle told about Clarinda’s steamy affair with the 18th century Scottish poet and playboy Robert Burns before moving up the Royal Mile and describing various other buildings, memorials and tales of Edinburgh’s women from Canongate to the Castle and back to the Grassmarket.

She explained: “I had the idea for a Real Woman of Edinburgh tour when someone told me there are more statues of animals than there are of women in Edinburgh. I knew there were a few stories around the Royal Mail already before I started researching further into it, and I was living in a women’s hostel at the time. The more I researched, the more I thought it would be a good tour.”

Gayle said that she has learned more about her home city through her experience as a tour guide, and she said that she’s showing people sides of Edinburgh even locals might not know about.

She added: “In more recent years since I’ve experienced homelessness, I found out that there are a lot of community projects on the Royal Mile. That’s something that you don’t see even as a local.

“You just see the tourists and things like the castle and the palace and the charity shops and stuff but you don’t know about the hostels where people are living and the places that are helping people out.”

Invisible Cities offers other tours of Edinburgh, including two themed around crime and punishment and the languages of Scotland. The enterprise also runs tours from Glasgow, York, Cardiff, and Manchester.

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