[0:06]Brick Lane is one of London's most vibrant areas. A colorful hotchpotch of different cultures, all mixed in with schools of street artists, designers, and hipsters.
[0:19]And it's always said it's busiest on a Sunday, when the famous Brick Lane market appears. Today, visitors come to this part of London to have a curry at one of the many restaurants or to pick up some cool vintage fashion. But back in the 19th century, tourists descended on this area for a very different reason. And the East End became the birthplace of what we now know as slum tourism. In the Victorian era, this was the poorest part of London. A great, dirty warren of slums.
[0:53]This footage, shot in the decades afterwards, gives us some idea of what it was like. Well-to-do ladies and gents would come here to observe the conditions in which the poorest lived. Some visitors had charitable intentions. Others were more interested in visiting the many opium dens and soliciting local prostitutes.
[1:21]A century later, in the 1990s, slum tourism emerged in the developing world. Occupants of the vast townships of South Africa, in the city slums in India, and Brazil's crowded favelas began to see busloads of wealthy Western tourists arriving in their communities. But in recent years, it seems that this trend has come full circle, returning to urban centers in the west. From cities like San Francisco and Brussels to right here in London's East End, where it all began. Today, I'm going to take a tour that shows the city from a very different perspective, through the eyes of somebody who's slept on these streets. It's what the police call a flash point. So you can be stopped and searched for no other reason than you are in a. Liz has lived in London for 20 years and has been homeless on and off for most of her adult life. Three times a week, she hosts a tour that combines history with social issues and her own personal experiences. The church or St. Leonard's church. This was built in the 1700s after Christopher Wrand and St. Paul's. These white church started popping up. This church used to be somewhere where the homeless people would sleep along the steps. But you can't sleep here anymore. If you read these signs here and here, they say that anyone's stuff found here will be treated as rubbish and you yourself can be moved on by the police if found loitering. It made sense that somebody who had lived amongst the streets might know something about it. And if they didn't, maybe they could attach slightly more of a love for that history, as opposed to it being kind of sterile and
[3:13]because you do feel more attached and more familiar. It's more familiar to you. We don't want to stereotype and we want people to see the homeless person as an individual and capable of doing a job other than begging for your change on the street. So the flea market would have come all the way down here. Liz's walk through the East End is one of five tours guided by homeless people in key tourist areas across London. And it's all organized by an outreach group called the Sock Mob. It is the negative connotations of slum tourism that we're fighting against. The guides get 60% of the ticket sales. So the majority of the money goes to the guides. We are building a group that, you know, everyone feels invested in. And the guides also feel that they have some ownership over. Light and dark, you know. But so Many experts see the Sock Mob tours in London as part of a spike in slum tourism growth across the world. Slum tourism is growing rapidly at the moment. Jakarta has one now, Thailand has some now, happens in Mexico, in Egypt, even in London, there is the Sock Mob, it's unseen tours, which although not a true slum tourism, in a sense, the word is a similar form of tourism. So you can really see it's picking up at incredible pace, and it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Slum tours have been roundly denounced over the years as exploitative poverty tourism, or poorism, an exercise in objectifying disadvantaged people for the curiosity of visitors. Were a lot of tourists that were just had just had tourists sitting in a bus, looking out upon the people. And some of the local people said, yeah, we felt like animals in a zoo being watched at. And that's of course the critique that slum tourism often gets. But there are signs that the wider tourism industry is increasingly embracing the trade. Whereas initially there was a lot of negative writing on it, and there still is a lot of negative writing on it. But now there's a counter argument being made that it also can be used as a force for good. So the question is, is it always ethical for travelers to take part in a tour that focuses on deprived areas or disadvantaged people? And how can we be sure that tours are having some sort of benefit and not making the situation worse? The biggest challenge for tourists when deciding whether or not to go on a slum tour and and if so, which tour to to use, is knowing which ones are genuinely working to support and working in partnership with the local communities. And which ones are just saying that they're doing that because they know that that's probably what tourists want to hear. Have a look at the websites, talk to the the tour operators directly, find out about how they work with communities, whether they're linked with community projects. Is there an opportunity to to buy products from local vendors, visit community initiatives, go to local bars or restaurants, all these kinds of things help bring very much needed money to the local economy.
