Edinburgh Historic Walks: A Summary of Hidden Histories

Edinburgh Historic Walks: A Summary of Hidden Histories is the result of months of student-staff collaborative research and community engagement. It summarises the histories explored in the funded project Edinburgh Historic Walks, created to challenge the historical neglect of marginalised communities in Edinburgh. Each chapter in the booklet explores a different topic, containing four to five locations along a 30-minute walking route. Each location is directly related to an aspect of marginalised history, involving women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, and other diverse communities.

These self-led walking routes enable the recovery and recognition of lost narratives in Edinburgh’s history, connecting people with the city and joining the dots between untold stories. Included are tales of inequality and injustice, societal change and revolutionary acts – such as the suffragette bombing of the Royal Observatory. Showcasing this heritage is a vital step forward in building a more inclusive historical picture and modern-day society. We hope this book ensures the histories are open, tangible, and accessible to a wide audience, and helps bring some of these pioneering Edinburgh individuals back into the public conscious, and into the history books.