Six European walking tours that celebrate women

From Manchester to Reykjavík, innovative tours are highlighting forgotten stories and re-incorporating female legacies into the popular tourist narrative.

A bouquet of white roses hangs from the bronze wrist of Emmeline Pankhurst. But her rallying stance – hand outstretched towards Manchester's former Free Trade Hall where she organised the first suffragette meetings that would change the course of British history – remains defiantly unchanged. Further bunches of white flowers, symbolising the purity of the women's suffrage movement and its fight for female political equality, have been tucked at her feet, wilting gently in the spring sunlight that filters through the city's skyscrapers. They are a reminder of the immense progress made in British women's rights since Pankhurst's early 20th-Century campaigns – and, perhaps, of how far there is left to go.

Manchester has long touted its association with the historic struggle for gender parity, yet the city's civic championing of the women who helped shape its progress is muted at best. When Pankhurst's bronze likeness (titled "Rise Up, Women") was unveiled in 2018, it became the first statue of a woman to be erected in a public space in the city since a monument of Queen Victoria was installed in Piccadilly Gardens in 1905. Even now, it is one of only four city-centre statues of named women, compared to 18 of men.

But a counter-revolution is quietly brewing. I'm visiting the Pankhurst statue as part of a new self-guided walking route, the Feminist Tour of Manchester, which explores little-known stories of its impactful women and historically marginalised LGBTQ+ figures.

Though the suffragettes naturally feature, it emphasises those who never became household names: for example, Mary Fildes, a trailblazing 19th-Century birth control activist; and Enriqueta Rylands, who founded the Neo-Gothic masterpiece that is the John Rylands Library, becoming the first woman to receive honorary Freedom of the City of Manchester. There's a thought-provoking stop at the Peterloo Massacre Memorial (commemorating those who lost their lives in a peaceful working-class protest for parliamentary representation and universal suffrage that turned violent); while the neon jumble of Chinatown's alleyways provides the backdrop to the story of the author and campaigner Alicia Little, whose work highlighted – and eventually helped change – the poor status of women's rights in British marital law. 

"People have a feeling that there is feminist history in Manchester, but they can't pinpoint what it is," says Zakia Moulaoui Guery, founder of Invisible Cities, the social enterprise behind the tour, which launches this month. "It's not too late to retrieve those stories or to have more of that representation."

Manchester isn't the only city where under-represented women are getting their moment in the spotlight. Across Europe, feminist walking tours that uncover "forgotten" stories that have often been preserved in letters and diaries or handed down through word of mouth are gaining popularity. Here are five more tours re-incorporating female legacies into the popular tourist narrative.

Iceland regularly ranks at the top of the World Economic Forum's gender gap index, yet the urban planning of its capital, Reykjavík, doesn't necessarily reflect its progressive values. "We don't even have a statue up of the first female democratically elected president in the world – there's no statue of her anywhere in Reykjavík," says resident Tinna Eik Rakelardóttir, referring to Iceland's former president Vigdís Finnbogadóttir.

Inspired by a tour she took in Ljubljana, Eik Rakelardóttir launched the Reykjavík Feminist Walking Tour, unpicking 200 years of the nation's drive for gender equality and providing context from her experience as a woman in contemporary Icelandic society. The scenic walk begins in the neighbourhood of Mæðragarður before moving downtown through the capital's manicured squares, concluding at the historic school Kvennskólinn (Reykjavík Women's Gymnasium). Participants learn about Finnbogadóttir – who happened to be Eik Rakelardóttir's neighbour growing up – alongside lesser-known women and marginalised groups whose influence on gender progress she feels should be more publicly visible. After all, she concludes: "We should know what methods they used and let those stories inspire us."

French gender and science researcher Averil Huck first noticed an absence of female representation upon moving to Prague and taking walking tours around the Czech capital, where just 5% of street names honouring people reference women. She began conducting her own research and launched Prague Feminist Tours in summer 2023. Her popular tour To the Roots of Czech Women's Emancipation leads participants through the city's spellbinding historic streets, taking in fabled landmarks such as the Charles Bridge, National Theatre and Old Town Square, while regaling them with the tales of those who fought for access to education, careers and voting rights in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

She has since launched three additional tours, including one held around the festival of Dušičky (All Souls' Day) on 2 November, which takes place in the city's Olšany Cemeteries and pays tribute to nine of its most important female historical and cultural figures. "We stop in front of their graves and light a little candle or leave a flower and I tell the stories of these people," says Huck. "I like to do it in the fall because this cemetery is really overgrown with nature and the colours become beautiful."

Criminals such as Jack the Ripper brought gritty infamy to the streets of London's East End in the 19th Century, yet the neighbourhood has also been home to scores of influential women – notably Mary Wollstonecraft, the writer and philosopher often dubbed Britain's first feminist; or prominent textile designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. Women of London, a tour company founded by Becky Laxton-Bass, spotlights both figures and countless other women who inhabited the vibrant neighbourhood from the 1660s through to the 1940s, analysing how they lived and highlighting the social issues they faced. "I think it's an area of London lots of people don't really know, so it attracts both locals and tourists," says Laxton-Bass. 

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The company also runs walking tours of Westminster and Bloomsbury, unearthing women's stories rarely relayed by traditional tours and crafting a narrative that blends historical and contemporary feminist issues. "My hope," says Laxton-Bass, "is that people realise that women's history is everywhere."

In Paris, Julie Marangé launched her first walking tour, focussing on feminist street art, after being disappointed by the French reaction to the #MeToo movement. It led to the creation of Feminists in the City, which now operates in the French capital as well as Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Marseille, and spotlights women through history and culture via walking tours, conferences and masterclasses. Its most popular tour is currently The Witch Hunt, Powerful Women of Paris, which uncovers the powerful women accused of sorcery from the Middle Ages onwards. Another centres on female sexual liberation in the lively streets of the Pigalle neighbourhood, delving into the rebellious and subversive feminist roots of the French can-can dance now associated with the Moulin Rouge and the story of the venue's first known female clown, Cha-U-Kao. The tours are extensively researched by Marangé with the help of the historian and women’s rights specialist Claudine Monteil, who was a close friend of the legendary feminist Simone de Beauvoir. "We're not re-writing history, we are just telling a different story," says Marangé. "It's a different angle, a different perspective; really it's about making women visible in the story of humanity."

Amsterdam's modern feminist history is inherently synonymous with the story of Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist who spent more than two years hidden in a secret annexe in the city alongside her family during World War Two and became one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust. These days, Anne Frank's House receives more than one million visitors annually – but the Dutch capital's gabled canal-front buildings have cultivated plenty of other female legends.

Many of them are brought to light on Martine Bontjes' Women of Amsterdam tour that loops through the city's historic centre, taking in the work of pioneering figures such as Lijsbeth Vaas, an 18th-Century undercover police officer. Bontjes, whose viewpoint is also inspired by her grandmother's experiences as a woman securing financial independence in post-WW2 Amsterdam, launched her popular tour in 2022 and now runs it every week. "It's something that so many women are now connected to, since there are so many laws now under pressure," she says. "I believe that this really is the time for women to come together and to share stories."

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