RENEGADE GUIDES: THE PLACES WE GO, THE STORIES WE SHARE
How can tours enable us to notice and appreciate our built environment and more fully inhabit the spaces we live in and places we traverse?
Towards the end of 2024, during a highly contentious election season, writer, guide and founder of Living London, Saira Niazi, spent two months in the US (New York and San Francisco) developing a research project on tour guiding.
Attending various walking tours and community events, exploring hidden gems and local neighbourhoods and interviewing renegade guides, organisers and storytellers from all walks of life, Niazi sought answers to the pressing questions that prompted her journey. What makes a tour? Who decides which stories get shared? How can we better support our communities?
The Renegade Guides handbook – a new resource, created with and for guides, is filled with practical advice, reflections, case studies, stories, ideas and a manifesto.
Renegade Guides Launch, 31/05/25, 5-7pm, Rabbits Road Press
“We educate people about things we care about and invite them to care about them too—to campaign, to take direct action, to join networks, or to volunteer. We introduce people to new foods and hidden gems. We challenge preconceived ideas and negative stereotypes…”
Come along to the launch of the Renegade Guides handbook – learn more about the research project and the processes involved, buy a copy of the book, and find out how you can become a guide, or preserve and share stories of people and place that matter to you. The author will be in conversation with Fatuma Khaireh.
The handbook will be free and available to download following the launch. You can also buy a physical copy at the event (available in both large and small formats).
This event is for renegade guides, socially engaged art practitioners, and those interested in community-centred tours. To attend, RSVP via link below or email info@livinglondon.org for more information! Free. Limited spaces.
You can download the book here shortly after the launch event.
This project was funded by the Churchill Fellowship, a UK charity which supports individual UK citizens to follow their passion for change, through learning from the world and bringing that knowledge back to the UK.
