Meet the ex-Big Issue vendor who went from homelessness to giving Prince William a tour of Aberdeen

Former Big Issue seller Angus has gone from homelessness to giving Prince William a tour of Aberdeen as part of an initiative to help homeless people into work.

Angus, who used to sell the magazine in Edinburgh, started delivering walking tours with social enterprise Invisible Cities, which operates around UK cities, after Big Issue staff put him on to the scheme.

Now the 69-year-old is launching Invisible Cities’ new branch in Aberdeen and his first-ever walking tour in the city on 27 March had a special guest: Prince William.

The royal was in the Scottish city to launch a new employment pathway for people who have experienced homelessness as part of his Homewards initiative – a five-year plan aimed at ending homelessness.

• Prince William: ‘Why I wanted to work with the Big Issue’
• What really happened when Prince William sold the Big Issue
• Prince William stuns shoppers with surprise Tesco visit to sell Big Issue with our man Dave

Invisible Cities tours will now roll out across the other Homewards locations – Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, Lambeth, Sheffield, Newport in Wales and Northern Ireland – in a bid to boost employment and skills.

“Prince William was really easy to speak to and friendly and chatty and had lots of relevant questions to ask. The actual tour was very easy,” said Angus, who insisted it was the preparation that was “nerve-wracking” rather than the tour on the day.

“He asked about Invisible Cities, how I got involved with Invisible Cities, how the setting up of the Aberdeen branch was going, things related to the tour that I was actually talking about, the type of housing. The tour I do is sort of bricks and mortar and cement-based because I’m an old crumbly building worker. So it was a mixture of asking about Invisible Cities and about Aberdeen. It’s a rather unique building landscape, you might say, and it’s history. 

“Back when I was selling the Big Issue I never thought I’d be giving Prince William a tour of Aberdeen.”

The future king’s visit also saw him meet new graduates from Invisible Cities’ most recent trainees at Aberdeen’s Trinity Hall.

Guides undertake four weeks of training and upon graduating they can either become a guide or have gained skills they are able to take onto other employment opportunities.

Angus told the Big Issue that his experience at Invisible Cities has convinced him of the concept’s potential to boost employment opportunities.

He’s similarly convinced that Prince William’s Homewards mission can help turn around the growing UK homelessness crisis.

“When I began Invisible Cities I was really only thinking of some occupation for myself, an income and a job,” said Angus. “As time has gone by, I’ve become really engaged with it and I think it’s really good that we collaborate with other things such as Homewards, Social Bite and so on. To be quite honest, I didn’t know about Homewards before the Prince’s tour came up. It’s always good, the more people who get to know the better.

“I think it’s 100% positive. He was quite clearly genuinely interested. It’s not like a thing that he just does. I’m aware some people have criticism and say: ‘Oh, what does a royal know? They live a life of privilege.’ I think that’s completely irrelevant. As a royal, and having a life of privilege, he could quite easily not do this. I think it’s totally a positive and he’s in a very good position to do this and he’s doing it very well.”

Each Invisible Cities tour is crafted by the tour guide themselves, ensuring a unique insight into each city.

Angus told Big Issue that this one-of-a-kind perspective is not only a good way of seeing lesser-known parts of the city, it also helps to break down barriers between people experiencing homelessness and the rest of the general population.

“Invisible Cities is quite different in every way from the better-known touring guide companies,” said Angus. “One thing that is different is that each guide is making their own tour. There is no company tour or company script as such. My Edinburgh tours – I did two different ones – were both out of my own head and that’s the same for all our guides. It’s kind of our individual view.

“It’s the fact that all the guides have experienced homelessness and vulnerability, so it gives us a different insight on the place we live in. It’s also a contact. For perfectly understandable reasons, most people have never had any real contact with a homeless person and I think it’s very good to show that we can do stuff, we can be useful. It’s a slightly different insight. We tend to know places and cities that other people either don’t know or don’t talk about. Because we have lived in those corners.”

If you want to catch a tour with Angus, he will be showing tourists around Aberdeen on Friday afternoons. Tours also operate in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and York. Head to Invisible Cities’ website for more details.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Big Issue is demanding an end to extreme poverty. Will you ask your MP to join us?