About the company
Unseen Tours grew out of the work of The Sock Mob, a volunteer network founded in 2010 that supports people experiencing homelessness across London. Through simple acts of kindness and conversation, The Sock Mob helps create meaningful connections between people from different backgrounds and life experiences.
Building on this approach, Unseen Tours provides opportunities for people with lived experience of homelessness or insecure housing to develop, curate and lead guided walking tours across London. These tours offer unique perspectives on the city while helping guides share their stories, skills and local knowledge.
Since launching in 2010, Unseen Tours has worked with more than 28 guides and delivered tours in eight London neighbourhoods. The organisation now runs over 450 tours each year and welcomes more than 6,500 visitors annually.
About the project
Project Background
Building on the community-focused work of The Sock Mob, the project empowers guides to develop and lead their own tours, providing paid employment, skills development, confidence-building and greater social inclusion. The tours are co-created with the guides themselves, ensuring their experiences and voices remain at the heart of the programme.
Current Situation
- Operates as a social enterprise, providing guided walking tours led by individuals with lived experience of homelessness or insecure housing.
- Offers unique insights into London for both visitors and long-term residents through the personal stories and perspectives of its guides.
- Aims to challenge perceptions of homelessness and promote greater understanding of the challenges people may face.
- Supports guides through paid employment opportunities while helping them develop confidence, skills and social connections.
- Reinvests any surplus income back into the organisation to engage more guides and expand its impact.
- Directs the majority of ticket revenue to guides, ensuring they benefit directly from the tours they deliver.
Project Objectives
- Provide paid employment opportunities for people with lived experience of homelessness or insecure housing through tour guiding
- Empower guides to share their own stories and perspectives, giving them a platform to be heard and represented authentically
- Develop confidence, skills and social inclusion by supporting guides to create, curate and deliver walking tours
- Challenge public perceptions of homelessness through meaningful conversations and direct engagement between guides and visitors
- Highlight the value, talents and potential of people who have experienced homelessness, helping to reduce stigma and promote understanding.
- Offer unique, educational experiences of London by providing guided tours shaped by guides' lived experiences and local knowledge.
- Reinvest income to expand impact, engaging more guides and increasing the reach of the organisation's work
Unseen Tours Business Statement
What do you think the students brought to the business? Were there ideas different from what you could have achieved if you have conducted this project in-house?
For a small social enterprise like Unseen Tours, it was invaluable to have input from the students. The chief challenge which we posed to the student group was our lack of resources to measure and communicate our impact in an effective, sustainable way. The challenge is complex and multi-tiered, but the students understood our layered needs and designed outputs that catered to our specifi c business problem.
The students used an Open Innovation approach which brought in external knowledge from multiple sources, through an intermediary event with 19 participants from 7 different sectors. Their process, which included pre-ideation, distant search, ideation, recombination, and selection, was thoroughly and thoughtfully conducted with time, energy and care that would not have been possible with our already-stretched in-house team.
How do you think the Business Projects have helped your business?
Ultimately, the project landed on a Live Impact Dashboard powered by automated workfl ows and AI, that turns current data into real-time, funder-ready impact evidence. This helps our business by reducing the bottleneck when it is time for impact reporting. By ensuring that the data is generated and updated in real-time, our partners, funders and customers will be able to get a much fuller picture of the work that Unseen Tour does.
How will you use the outcomes in your business going forward?
As we are undergoing a revamp for our website, we plan to integrate the live impact dashboard that the students have helped us research and design into our new site. This will be invaluable in communicating our impact to our funders, partners and the public in real-time.