HERSTORICAL TOURS *Special Report*

Former language teacher Maria Beadell combined a love of storytelling, performance and history to create Herstorical Tours. Drawn to the women who have too often been left on the margins of history, she set out not simply to tell different stories, but to ask why those stories disappeared in the first place.Maria researches, writes and performs immersive walking tours through London that uncover the lives of witches, suffragettes, courtesans, mystics, artists and campaigners whose stories are often richer, stranger and more relevant than the history many of us were taught. Her work isn't about rewriting history—it is about widening our understanding of it, revealing that history is often shaped as much by omission as by fact.In this conversation we explore far more than London's forgotten women. We discuss why certain stories survive - what draws us to particular historical figures, and whether the people we admire from the past are really reflections of our own unanswered questions. It's a fascinating conversation about memory, identity, power and the enduring influence of the stories we choose to tell.