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Manasi Pophale - Community Heritage Practitioner and Tour Guide

@historyspeak

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📍Walking tours in London, UK
Founder @historyspeak
Trusted by: Mayor of London, Historic Royal Palaces, BBC Radio 4 and Natural History Museum

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I’ve never recorded a walk like this before.

When I decided to record Jeanne’s last walk, there was an urgency - that if I didn’t do it now, something irreplaceable would be gone. Her candour, humour, voice, point of view and the way she tells these women’s stories is unique. I loved the way she referred to them as “my women.” 💜

Now I am working on making Jeanne’s self guided audio walk available and accessible. Watch this space for updates!
This project has been made possible thanks to the Wandsworth Community Heritage Fund.

🤝 Supported by the Wandsworth Community Heritage Fund
@WelcomeToWandsworth by @historyspeak

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9 days ago

Last Saturday, 40 people walked through Battersea for Jeanne Rathbone’s final in-person walk, and the beginning of something that will last.

For years, Jeanne has brought Battersea’s hidden histories to life, uncovering the women written out of plaques and official records. Through her voice, research and storytelling, these stories return to the streets where they belong.

With her in-person walks coming to a natural end, we captured the experience in full: her voice, humour, pace, the laughter, the pauses and the atmosphere of walking together. This is intangible heritage: knowledge that lives in one person's voice and vanishes the moment they stop telling it. A written record can hold the facts. It can't hold who tells them, or how and a story changes shape depending on who's carrying it.

Now, that recording is being transformed into a free, self-guided audio tour, so Jeanne’s storytelling can continue reaching people long after the walk has ended.

Join us in November at ROSE Community Clubroom for a community listening event, where we’ll share the first cut of the audio tour.

📅 Date to be announced.

A piece of Battersea’s heritage, captured, preserved and made accessible for everyone.

🤝 Supported by Wandsworth Community Heritage Fund
📸 @wachiras_photography by @historyspeak

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13 days ago

THE WOMEN WHO SHAPED BATTERSEA 🌟 Battersea has been home to some inspiring and pioneering women throughout history, whose stories are woven into our streets, but we might have never known it…

That was until 2018, when local historian Jeanne Rathbone discovered that not a single heritage plaque in Battersea commemorated a woman.

The discovery led to eight years of research and campaigning, with plaques now in place recognising some of these incredible women, including Britain’s first female pilot, suffragettes, social reformers and Black activists.

Jeanne leads history tours in the area and next Saturday 12 September, she’ll be leading one of her final in-person walking tours, starting at Battersea Arts Centre and walking through the local streets where she’ll explore the stories of the women who helped shape the borough.

The walk will also be recorded by History Speak CIC as a free audio tour, preserving Jeanne’s knowledge and stories for future generations. It’s free to come along, we’ve put the link in our bio to book.

📍 Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill
📅 Saturday 12 September, 11am
🎟️ Free - link in bio to book

Supported by the Wandsworth Community Heritage Fund and @welcometowandsworth

#battersea #inspiringwomenofbattersea #hiddenhistories #wandsworthheritage #claphamjunction taken in Battersea by @historyspeak

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a month ago

This Saturday, Jeanne Rathbone leads one of her last in-person walks through Battersea sharing the stories of the women who shaped this borough, drawn from years of her research.

As Jeanne’s in-person walks come to a natural end, we’re recording this one so her voice, her research and her way of telling these stories are never lost.

This isn’t just a walking tour. It’s an archive in the making and everyone who joins becomes part of it.

📍 Saturday 12th September, 11am

📍 Battersea Arts Centre

🤝 Supported by Wandsworth Community Heritage Fund

Join us to become part of the legacy.

#InspiringWomenOfBattersea #HiddenHistories by @historyspeak

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20 days ago

This year, London Unseen Collective brought people together to explore the stories, communities and histories that have shaped the city around us.

Through free walking tours, people discovered histories they hadn’t encountered before, saw familiar places differently, asked questions, shared experiences and, importantly, wanted to keep exploring.

Our impact survey showed us that the walks reached people from a wide range of backgrounds and places, with many participants returning, recommending the tours and bringing others along.

For us, that is the impact.

Learn. Reflect. Connect. Continue.

History isn’t just something we read.
It’s something we walk through.When access is free, more people have the opportunity to take part.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined a walk, shared their experience, recommended us to someone else and helped make London’s stories a little less unseen.

Thank you to @citywestminster for making this programme possible through funding and supporting our work to bring these histories into public spaces.

This is what happens when London becomes a little less unseen. @alittlehistoryofthesikhs @muslimhistorytours @okdotb_dj @hidden_tudors_tours by @historyspeak

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a month ago

AbdulMaalik is Briatin’s first professionally qualified Muslim tour guide. He has spent years uncovering the Muslim histories woven into London’s streets, buildings and landmarks.

The development of his new walking tour from Hyde Park to Regents Park, as part London Unseen Collective for Inside Out 2026, was supported by Westminster City Council. Ending our programme with a new walking tour feels right. New stories brought into the foreground and new perspectives on a part of London many of us thought we knew.

Thank you AbdulMaalik for bringing your knowledge, research and perspective to the London Unseen Collective, and for giving us exactly the kind of ending this programme deserved.

This is what the Collective is built on independent practitioners, each with their own expertise and their own community’s story, coming together to show that London’s history is never just one story.

The London Unseen Collective will be back.

@muslimhistorytours supported by @citywestminster by @historyspeak

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a month ago

As Inside Out Festival 2026 draws to a close, so do my Empire walks for August.

I started doing these walks because I could not find the story of Empire in school history textbooks. But the story is present in the city around us, in the buildings we walk past, the institutions we visit and the streets we cross without a second thought.

That is why I dedicated three walks to exploring it from different angles.

Empire on Display looked at how architecture, museums and public spaces were used to project imperial power and to tell a deliberate story about civilisation and who stood at its centre.

This tour felt particularly personal to me. My background is in Exhibition Design and Narrative Environments. I studied how spaces tell stories, communicate identity, power and memory. Standing in front of these buildings and monuments and interpreting them from the an art history perspective brings my design background and work in historical walks together.

Empire at War: Memorials, Sacrifice and the Cost of Conflict took us to memorials across London to ask whose sacrifices were remembered, whose were overlooked, and what it means to commemorate wars that were not experienced equally.

Empire and Legacy: Colonisation, Decolonisation and the Politics of Memory brought us to perhaps the most difficult question: not simply what empire was, but what it left behind and how that legacy continues to shape the world around us.

Three walks. Three different questions. One city.

And each walk was made richer by the people who brought their own knowledge, experiences and questions into the conversation.

Supported by @citywestminster

📸 @wachiras_photography by @historyspeak

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a month ago

Women and Power was my second walking tour as part of the London Unseen Collective, supported by
@citywestminster

Westminster is home to more statues of women than almost anywhere else in London. Yet a monument can only tell part of a story.

Who were these women? What did power mean for them? What did it cost them? And whose voices are still missing?

Women and Power invites us to look beyond the plaque, question the histories we have inherited and make space for the hidden voices that have too often been left out.

For me, this is what the London Unseen Collective is about: creating belonging through history, bringing diverse voices into the conversation and using collaboration to tell a richer, more complete story of London.

History cannot be told through one voice alone.

#TogetherWeSpeakHistory #LondonUnseenCollective #InsideOutFestival #freewalkingtours #cdpr by @historyspeak

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a month ago

What happens when we make space for new voices to tell the stories of our city?

For Krissi, this was more than her first walking tour. It was an opportunity to bring her own research, perspective and questions into the streets of Westminster and invite others to walk alongside her.

That’s what the London Unseen Collective is about.

Creating space for people to step forward, share the histories they have connected with, and give us new ways to understand the places we think we already know.

When more people have the opportunity to tell our city’s stories, we all have the opportunity to see it differently.

Walk together. Learn together. Question together.

In partnership with @insideoutfestival · Supported by @citywestminster

📸 @wachiras_photography

#TogetherWeSpeakHistory #LondonUnseenCollective #InsideOutFestival #freewalkingtours #cdpr by @historyspeak

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a month ago

A huge thank you to Krissi Boakye @okdotb_dj for joining the London Unseen Collective and bringing her perspective on Black history and heritage to Westminster.

Krissi’s passion, research and storytelling are a powerful reminder of why representation in heritage matters. The storyteller shapes how a story is understood, felt and remembered.

There is something special about watching someone take that leap for the first time.

If you have a story you want to represent? Whether you’ve never led a walk before or you’ve been doing it for years, let’s connect and keep building this network, because history belongs to us all.

In partnership with Inside out festival. Supported by @citywestminster by @historyspeak

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a month ago

We understand history differently when we stop looking at it alone.

On 14 and 15 August, the London Unseen Collective brought people together in Westminster to walk through the legacy of 1947, not simply to revisit what happened, but to ask what these histories mean to us now.

Two guides. Different perspectives. One shared space.

The past does not belong to one person, one community or one version of the story.

It lives in the places we share, the memories we carry and the conversations we are willing to have with one another.

This is what collaboration makes possible.
A space to listen, question and see what we may not have seen before.

And perhaps, in looking at the city differently, to understand our own place within it differently too.

We’re grateful to everyone who helped make these conversations possible @childofthedivide @partitionmemorial and
@pothohar_uk @everydaymuslimheritage

This programme is supported by @citywestminster as part of the Inside Out Festival.

#TogetherWeSpeakHistory #LondonUnseenCollective #InsideOutFestival #freewalkingtours #cdpr by @historyspeak

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a month ago

Yesterday, 🇵🇰 Pakistan celebrated its 79th Independence Day. Today, 🇮🇳 India celebrates its 79th Independence Day.

Between these two dates lies a history of independence, Partition, migration, loss, identity and belonging that continues to shape generations.

It also provides a powerful moment to reflect on the London Unseen Collective walking tour Partition Heritage Trail: Legacy of 1947, organised to coincide with both Independence Days.

Drawing on the Partition Heritage Trail map developed by @everydaymuslimheritage , the walk is guided by myself and @alittlehistoryofthesikhs Together, they explore the legacy of the Partition of Punjab and Bengal and its connections to London the spaces where decisions were made and lives were changed.

Partition was not simply the drawing of a line on a map. It reshaped communities, separated families, transformed places and created stories of migration and belonging that continue to resonate today.

The borders themselves were not announced until 17 August 1947, after India and Pakistan had already celebrated independence.

This is exactly why the London Unseen Collective exists.

Independent practitioners. Shared purpose. One network bringing different perspectives of London into view.

Through these walks, we create space to explore the histories that have shaped the city and consider how those histories continue to shape the communities and places around us.

Today, we walk with the legacy of 1947. 🇮🇳🇵🇰

📸 @wachiras_photography

#PakistanIndependenceDay #IndiaIndependenceDay #TogetherWeSpeakHistory #LondonUnseenCollective by @historyspeak

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