Initially “terrified” due to their lack of experience, the pair, who met while studying business at university, have seen the guided tours prove such a hit that the business expanded to incorporate other locations across Scotland in 2019, before a further expansion south of the border in 2022.
Thanks to Glasgow’s growing reputation as a year-round cultural destination, visitor numbers on their Glasgow tours have snowballed by more than 50% from 7,000 visitors in 2022 to more than 15,000 in 2024, with their one-hour-and-30-minute Glasgow City Centre tour now welcoming an average of 15 people a day.
Liv Barber, co-founder and managing director at Walking Tours in Glasgow, now known as Walking Tours in the UK, is expecting a bumper year as the firm gears up for peak tourism season in 2025.
She told The Herald: “It’s looking really good. Really positive. We had a great year last year in Glasgow and everywhere else as well. This year we’ve already got more enquiries than we had this time last year. It’s looking like it’s going to be a busy year. I think we had about 15,000 visitors on the tours last year. So it was massive.
“We’ve been running a few more tours. We started a Necropolis tour and we did the ‘Dark Side of Glasgow’ tour kind of like special events. That’s really helped boost the numbers and then I think as well Glasgow Life has done an amazing job at promoting Glasgow as a destination. So it’s now on the map. When people come to Scotland they want to visit Glasgow and they want to see it. It’s great. Scotland as a whole I think is just growing and growing.”
As well as the ‘classic’ Glasgow City Centre tour – which operates once a day year-round and three times a day between May and October – the company also offers street art tours, a ‘Wee Walk and a Whisky Tour’ tour and a dedicated Charles Rennie Mackintosh tour, as well as extended private city tours of the City Centre, Necropolis and West End.
Ms Barber said: “We also run an LGBTQ+ history tour and we are going to put that on again as a special event later on this year. The ‘Wee Walk and a Whisky Tour’ is a little tour where you sort of see the city and then you go and have three drams of whisky with your guide at Mharsanta Restaurant & Bar in the Merchant City. The whisky tour was busy last year and then we also did quite a few Necropolis tours, especially around Halloween time.”
While the popularity of the public Mackintosh tours – which run every Saturday over the summer – has “remained steady” over the past few years, Ms Barber said the firm has witnessed an uptake in the number of people booking private tours.
In addition, Ms Barber believes that Glasgow’s burgeoning status as a top filming location for big-budget Hollywood blockbusters is attracting “a good diversity of visitors” to the city. The interest is such that the firm’s dedicated ‘Film Fanatics’ tours of the city’s movie locations, which were originally created in partnership with Glasgow Film Theatre to run during Glasgow Film Festival over two weeks in February/March, are now being offered as a private tour all-year-round.
Highlighting the many tours that the firm now operates in the city, Ms Barber said: “It’s just to offer something a bit different. People come with such different interests. Glasgow has so much to offer that it’s nice to be able to offer something specific for people’s interests whether it’s whisky or the Necropolis and that history or the dark history of the city. There’s so much for us to show off.”
The growth in popularity of the Glasgow walking tours is such that Walking Tours in the UK now employs 16 local guides in the city, with the firm “likely to add a few more” as the summer peak tourist season approaches.
“As a business we have grown too since 2022 because we now have a full-time Operations Assistant in the office here in Glasgow as well, which is great”, Ms Barber said.
Approximately 50% of visitors who take part in the Glasgow walking tours hail from the USA and Canada – up from 40% in 2022 – while the other 50% is made up of “Europeans, Australians and Brits”.
“The Banksy exhibition [at GoMA in 2023] pulled people in from other parts of the UK. We do a street art tour and whilst that was on those tours were a lot more popular and a lot of Brits were on that”, Ms Barber added.
“The Europeans and the Brits are often here for a long weekend or they are tying a visit in with an event, whether it’s a gig or something else that’s on in the city. They tend to be visiting just Glasgow. But the North Americans normally visit Glasgow as part of a wider [Scotland] trip.”
With Glasgow City Council launching its Glasgow 850 programme for 2025 – a year-long celebration marking 850 years since the city gained Burgh status in 1175 – Ms Barber said Walking Tours in the UK is keen to try and encourage more locals to do a walking tour to discover more about their home city.
She said: “I think it’s going to be a great year and I think the 850th anniversary celebrations are going to get even local people out and about to explore their city a bit more which will be great with all the events that are happening.
“We think later this year we’ll put on a couple of special events for the 850 celebrations. We aren’t sure what they are yet but we are going to do a couple of tours that appeal more to local people so that they can find out more about their own city. That will be great.
“It is primarily locals who take out ‘Dark Side of Glasgow’ tours it. It’s a kind of market that we haven’t really touched outside of Halloween. It would be good to try and get locals more involved in our tours.
“I think [local] people are amazed when they come on the tours because they are like, ‘Oh wow I never actually knew this. I’ve lived here my whole life and I haven’t seen this’ or ‘I didn’t know that’. There’s always something for even local people to learn.”
As for her own opinions on what it is that brings people to the city, Ms Barber finished: “There’s so many stories to tell. The guides are always suggesting new ideas. There is just so much to tell about the city that it’s great to be able to show it off in different ways. There’s still lots more to do.
“If only it rained less we’d be a lot busier. We tell the guests that it’s the authentic experience when they get rained on.”
