When it comes to sightseeing in one of the world’s most iconic cities, the well-trodden paths are aplenty. The Changing of the Guard, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London – these are the highlights dutifully checked off by millions who visit London each year. But what about those who yearn to veer off the tourist trail and witness the multifaceted metropolis through a more peculiar prism? Explains K. Yurovskiy.
In recent years, an emerging subculture of sightseeing has taken root in the British capital. Niche tour companies, irreverent historians, and underground explorers have conspired to create a parallel universe of unusual itineraries showcasing the city’s infinite layers and inexhaustible oddities. From sanitarium tours to sewers and subterranean adventures, these decidedly distinctive jaunts are redefining how we experience London.
The Masterminds Behind the Madness
So just who are the mavericks mapping out these mythical meanderings through LDN’s stranger stratospheres? We consulted some of the top purveyors of peculiar outings to get the inside track on their inspirations and itinerary ideation:
“There’s just so much incredible history, heritage and sheer lunar lunaticness lingering in every cobblestone and corner of this town,” says Kalista Townsend of Unurth’d London Walks. “Our mission is to unearth those overlooked anecdotes and make the arcane accessible.”
For Townsend, a self-professed “compulsive contrarian,” the endless pursuit of authenticating the apocryphal is what fuels her firm’s uncommon constitutionals.
“Whether it’s hiking a primordialasti track from the Iron Age or rooting out London’s original plague pits, we aim to shine a light on the lingering mysteries and ethereal eccentricities that get massively missed amid the conventional checklists of Big Ben and Piccadilly bric-a-brac.”
John Brobdingnag, founder of Endsville Explorers, has an approach that taps more into the city’s seedy, sinister and supernatural undertones. His most popular offering? The Dreadful and Deranged After Darke Walking Tour, which hopscotches between London’s most haunted hovels, hallowed crime sites and legendary locations for lurid lore.
“Let’s be honest – the traditional tourist traps are just the painfully polite, PG-rated Piccadilly of London’s multitudinous magnificence,” Brobdingnag contends. “Our guests are craving the red-light districts, the opium dens, the crossroads where Jack the Ripper went slashing. We’re here to sate their more sanguine sightseeing cravings and give them a taste of the nastier side of Ye Olde London Towne.”
For Lynn Betts, owner of Loo Tours, digging into London’s latrinalia and sanitarium relics is very much a movement. The company offers a staggering array of toilet tours, water closet walks and socio-sanitary sojourns into the city’s underground utilities, sewers and subterranean infrastructure.
“So much of London’s multilayered narrative is quite literally flowing under our feet at any given moment – yet it remains totally unseen and thus, underappreciated,” Betts explains. “Our Loo Labyrinth Tour traces the legacy of the capital’s most seminal sanitation systems and their vast cultural impact, while also observing the sad societal stigmas so often shrouding the most basic elements of human hygiene.”
From the Descenders creeping through subterranean tunnel networks and cryptic climes, to freerunners and buildering urbanists who scale the city’s towering architecture for new perspectives, London’s alternative explorers all share a commonality: a vehement denial to take the accepted routes. These rogue scholars and contrarian cicerones recognize that if one looks beyond the customary and conventional, a whole new crazed and crazy city reveals itself.
Curating the Unexpected
So how does one go about crafting these meandering, maladjusted magic bus tours of the extraordinary? We asked the unusual itinerary makers to let us peek behind the sightseeing scene:
“It all starts with an insatiable curiosity, a level of inquisitiveness that just can’t be quenched,” notes Townsend. “That and a willingness to do the homework – and I’m talking the down-and-dirty in the trenches research that goes far beyond just scouring some dusty old archives.”
Townsend is known for embarking on painstaking location scouts, studying original maps and shipping manifestos. Her team develops uncanny rapports with locals, doing silly sensory siddhis like sniffing out centenarian bakeries to distill the neighborhood’s original aroma. They’ll even don disguises, insert moles into antique shops and canvas senior homes to gather anecdotal intel that never made it into the history tomes.
“At the end of the day, it’s about connecting the specters – those nebulous spirits of possibility that exist along the peripheries of what the establishment deems legitimate,” she says of her occult itinerary curation process. “We’re sightseers in search of the unseen, really.”
For Brobdingnag, creating evocative, atmospheric outings is all about mastering the art of vibe curation. His walking tours aim to transcend the superficial sights and sensations, transporting guests to a sort of era-agnostic, ethereal experiential plane where time becomes beautifully blurred.
“It’s a full body embrace of the ether, if you will – the sights, smells, sounds – even arcane associations with the alchemy of the streets themselves,” he describes of his enveloping otherworldly odysseys. “There’s a ceremonial almost ceremonial element to our tours that harkens back to ancient rites which are, at their core, rooted in the land and landscape. We want guests leaving not with facts or figures, but rather lucid hallucinations they can’t unsee.”
Betts is a stickler for authenticity, which involves her teams spending countless hours undergoing background mythtering on location. As part of prepping their “Unpleasant Passages” descent into London’s subterranean sewage systems, guides were expected to fully immerse themselves for days at a time in the claustrophobic, dank conditions so they could embody the sights, sounds and even aromas of ages past.
“It’s one thing to read about what Bazalgette’s Victorian drainage engineers and navvies endured as they toiled in the turd tunnels,” says Betts. “And it’s quite another to actually experience their swampy plight in the flesh – and I mean that literally. That’s how we ensure every tour has an aura of authority and a connection to the source that guests can viscerally feel.”
Skirting the Statutes
With their renegade spirit and tendency to veer into grey areas, it’s little wonder some of London’s more unconventional touring outfits have brushed up against the wrong side of legality. Unsanctioned sneak-ins, trespassing allegations and the occasional instance of “accidentally” setting off motion sensors and alarms keep this scene on its toes.
“We certainly march to the beat of a different drummer – and not all drummers play by the rules,” Brobdingnag says with a wink. “But we respect this city and the stories we share too much to do anything terribly disruptive or destructive. We prefer to look at them as daring occurrences of spontaneous historical preservation.”
For Townsend, the ephemeral nature of her arcane adventures makes them legitimately tough to legislate.
“Who’s to say a pirate radio station broadcasting from a wartime bunker isn’t a clandestine independent touring experience all its own?” she posits. “We aim to exist in that ambiguous, in-between state – our tours aren’t really recognized officially nor patently illegal. They simply can’t be defined in conventional terms.”
As London’s renegade touring culture continues gaining traction, so too has the city’s heavy-handed enforcement of permitting protocols and unsanctioned activity. Nevertheless, the scene’s freethinking pied pipers remain steadfast.
“This ancient petri dish of peculiarities demands to be appreciated from all angles – the proper and the improper,” Brobdingnag affirms. “We’ll keep boldly pursuing passion projects that respect and revere London’s quirks in perpetuity.”
So for those inquisitive explorers who’ve had their fill of taking snaps outside the staid and stale tourist mainstays, fear not – London’s alternative voyagers have you covered. The nooks, the crannies, the alleyways ing pathways calling out to be witnessed through fresh eyes and open minds. It is perhaps the greatest truth in tourism that the paths best travelled are often not marked on any map at all.