Ten Years of Walking the Cities Nobody Else Shows You
By Zakia 11 min read
Invisible Cities turns ten in 2026!
So we wanted to tell you more about what a decade of guide-curated walking tours across the UK looks like – and why this anniversary is the perfect opportunity to discover the city you thought you already knew.
There’s a version of your city you’ve never been shown.
Not the hidden gem version – the one with the speakeasy bar and the street art that’s already on Instagram. The other one. The city made of memory and routine, of the routes people walk without even thinking about it. But often forget to look up and out.
Invisible Cities has been walking the city that way for ten years. And if you’ve never taken one of our tours, the tenth anniversary is the best possible reason to start – and to tell absolutely everyone you know – because you’ll be a part of our incredible community.
What Invisible Cities Is
Invisible Cities is a social enterprise that runs story led city walks guided by people with lived experience of homelessness. The tours operate across Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, York, Cardiff, Aberdeen, Newport, and Galashiels – and by the time we’re officially 10 at the end of this year; Liverpool and Belfast too.
Why the name? Every city has an invisible layer – a human community map beneath the official one, made of stories, relationships, and the people most often overlooked. The guides don’t just walk you through a city, they read it to you and as you’ll see from our reviews, it can be a pretty profound experience – as well as warm, witty, thought provoking and educational.
These are not charity tours and this is not doom and gloom. Our guides and tours are amongst the most incredible storytellers you’ll ever meet. A walk with them is worth every moment and we can’t wait for you to see that first hand.
People who have experienced homelessness carry an intimate, layered understanding of how cities actually function: and they’ve seen change, growth, recession and resilience first hand, over and over. That knowledge, turned into a tour, becomes something most cultural experiences never manage to be. We call it doing tourism differently and our biggest commitment is to create positive social impact wherever we go. And we know that by coming on a tour, that impact is multiplied every time we welcome a new guest.
Ten Cities. Ten Years. What That Looks Like.
Invisible Cities was launched in Edinburgh in 2016 by our founder Zakia Moulaoui Guery – which makes 2026 its tenth anniversary year. Over that decade we have expanded to become one of the UK’s most distinctive guided tour operators, not by replicating a formula across cities, but by finding guides in each place whose knowledge of that specific city is irreplaceable.
Over those years we’ve won awards with the likes of Lonely Planet and National Geographic Traveller.
We’ve been featured by the BBC, Sky News, The Guardian and The Times.
Prince William (actual royalty!) was the first guest on our Aberdeen tours.
And travel partners like Get Your Guide, Airbnb and booking.com all advocate for us.
Edinburgh
Where it started, and where the organisation’s character was set. The Old Town’s close network of wynds and closes, its long history of people living in plain sight while remaining socially invisible – a city that created the opportunity for Invisible Cities to become what it is today.
Glasgow
Post-industrial, proudly working-class, with a social fabric woven from community organisations, mutual aid, and fierce local loyalty. Glasgow’s Invisible Cities tours and larger than life guides delight customers week in week out.
Manchester
The gateway to the North – there’s a version of Manchester that’s all music venues and media companies and regeneration projects. The Invisible Cities tours walk a different version yet still nods to the art, culture and people that made it the thriving city it is today.
York
The city nobody expects Invisible Cities to be in – which makes it one of the most interesting. York presents as heritage tourism: Romans, Vikings, the Shambles and ghost stories. Invisible Cities uncovers the city that exists beside and beneath that version.
Cardiff, Aberdeen, Galashiels and the new cities…
Each of the remaining cities, like all of those before them, have incredible people supporting and training guides to run tours.
They’ve all been shaped by a specific urban experience and a specific relationship to how that city works, and who it works for.
To mark the anniversary, Invisible Cities is taking a summer roadshow to all ten cities – the most ambitious thing we have ever attempted, and a heart felt statement that we are a genuinely national social enterprise.
Why These Tours Are Different
The phrase ‘alternative city tour’ gets used a lot. Invisible Cities is worth being specific about.
Most alternative tours are alternative in route – they take you somewhere the mainstream bus tour doesn’t. The same mode, a different destination. Invisible Cities is alternative in purpose. Some say quirky, others say mission-driven – you might say meaningful. We try to ask a different question: what does this city look like from a position most of us have never occupied?
The guides are the answer. They’re not actors performing a script, or enthusiasts with a passion for local history. They are people whose relationship with the city has been defined by different circumstances – and who have turned that relationship into genuine expertise.
Their knowledge of Manchester’s city centre, or Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, or Glasgow’s East End is not the knowledge you’d get from a history book – well, maybe it is – but when it’s told from the perspective of someone who has seen the city in so many different guises, you get a far richer, intriguing story with it.
The result is a walking tour that changes how you see the city after you’ve left it. That’s a rarer outcome than your typical city walking tour usually delivers – and it’s something we are massively proud of that’s for sure!
What Invisible Cities Has Built
Ten years is long enough to have built something with tangible social impact, even though it can feel like it!
Over the course of the decade, Invisible Cities has trained and employed guides across ten cities, creating paid employment in the sector of cultural and regenerative tourism, that rarely employs people from backgrounds of homelessness. It has built relationships with councils, universities, housing associations, charities and cultural organisations across the UK.
Together we’ve visited other tours, packed care boxes for shelters and refuges, run workshops to give people knew employability skills and connected people with experts for specialist advice.
We’ve developed partnerships with organisations like Untours Foundation, G Adventures, Intrepid and Skyscanner, positioning ourselves with their aligned values of giving back to our communities as part of the wider travel and tourism ecosystem.
And we have delivered thousands of tours to guests who came expecting a nice walk and interesting chat, yet left with something far more. And that’s pretty special.
The Guides
It’s easy to describe what Invisible Cities does. It’s harder to describe what the guides bring to it – because what they bring is not easily categorised.
None of that knowledge they share is grim. In the hands of a good guide, it is clarifying. It makes the city make more sense. It answers questions you didn’t know you had about how the place you live, or are visiting, actually functions.
And it brings the rich history and diversity of our cities from industrial revolution to poetry and protest, music and magic, to life in a totally transformative way.
Our guides tell the stories that other’s don’t. Their stories, their words, their way.
For Visitors: What to Expect
The tours typically run for around an hour and a half, on foot, through central city areas. No coach, no headset, no laminated fact sheets. Just a guide, a route, and the city. Although, we should say, lots of coach trips book and love our tours when they’re looking for things to do as part of a wider itinerary – as do corporate groups looking to explore beyond the conference room.
Groups are small enough that you can hear the guide and ask questions. The pace is conversational rather than marching. What you’ll encounter is a mix of historical fact, personal story, and urban observation – and often, moments where something about the way the guide reads a building or a corner or a piece of street furniture makes you see something you’ve walked past a hundred times completely differently.
These are tours for curious people. People who have already seen the main sights, or who are more interested in the texture of a city than its highlights. They work for solo travellers, couples, groups of friends, corporate away days, school and university groups – and for people who just want an afternoon in a city to feel like it meant something.
The best thing about an Invisible Cities tour is that you can take it in a city you think you know. You’ll find out you didn’t.
The Cities on the Map
For visitors or locals searching for something beyond the obvious:
Edinburgh
Invisible Cities tours explore the Old Town’s human geography – the closes and courts and histories that sit underneath the castle-and-kilts version of the city. One of the most genuinely alternative walking tours in a city that is saturated with walking tours.
Glasgow
Tours operate across the city centre and beyond, reading Glasgow’s complex social and architectural history through guides who know it from ground level. Consistently rated among the most moving cultural experiences in the city.
Manchester
An alternative to the Northern Quarter bar crawl and the football museum. The Invisible Cities Manchester tours walk a version of the city that the regeneration narrative tends to leave out.
York
Doing something different in York almost always means escaping the crowds. Invisible Cities offers exactly that – a different kind of relationship with a city that is very used to being looked at.
Ten Years In. Here’s What You Can Do.
The tenth anniversary isn’t just a milestone for Invisible Cities, it’s an invitation. Here’s how to be part of it.
Tours run across ten UK cities and are bookable directly here on our website. Private group bookings are available if you want to take a team, a hen party, a book club, a class, or anyone else who deserves to see their city differently. Corporate group rates are available on request and we can’t wait to welcome you. We work closely with lots of DMCs, tour groups and conference venues and often create longer itineraries including speaker sessions or team building activities like our care box packing events.
Bring people with you.
An Invisible Cities tour is one of those experiences that works better shared. The conversations it starts tend to outlast the walk itself. It makes a genuinely good birthday gift, a team outing with something to say for itself, or a way to show visiting friends what your city is actually made of.
Rediscover your own city.
The tours aren’t just for visitors. Some of the most surprised guests are the people who have lived in a city for decades and still leave having learned something they didn’t know. If you haven’t taken a tour in your own city, the anniversary summer is the moment.
Spread the word.
Invisible Cities has reached its tenth year quietly, without a marketing budget that matches its ambition. The people who’ve taken tours have always been the organisation’s best advocates. If you’ve been on one, or once you have, please do tell someone – tell everyone! A review, a share, a recommendation to a friend planning a trip. It makes a real difference.
Invisible Cities is working toward a £125,000 fundraising target to launch its tenth city and sustain the work across the existing eight cities. Donations go directly toward guide training and employment, new city development, and keeping the tours running for the next ten years. If the work matters to you, you can support it on our gift or give page.
Ten years. Ten cities. Too many guests to count who saw something they didn’t expect to see. The next ten start now – want to come on an adventure?!
Tours can be booked on our website. The anniversary summer roadshow visits all ten cities so check the website for dates and availability coming really soon.
