Summer 2025 Tour Schedule Now Live!

Ravine tours, bridge tours, river tours, family tours, park tours, accessible tours, infrastructure tours, neighbourhood tours, waterfront tours....

Two weeks ago, the Hidden Rivers community consecrated our summer with an incredible kick-off in Christie Pits. Soundtracked by Kubla, we did a scavenger hunt around the park and vowed to explore our city under a rainbow parachute.

New policy proposal: universal basic rainbow parachute.

Now, we make good on our vow. Today, I am launching my full tour schedule for the rest of summer 2025.

Feel free to head right to the booking page to book your tour, or keep reading to learn more about all of the different kinds of tours on offer this summer.

Parks and Wires and Chairs, Oh My!

Many of these tours were designed with specific audiences in mind, but don’t let that limit you: everyone is welcome to attend any tour. Playgrounds are for grownups too.

1. Playground Tours

Dates: July 26 & 27.

Description: On this tour, we learn about Toronto through lens of its parks & playgrounds. It is especially well-suited for parents & children: kids will have plenty of time to play at parks that bookend the tour. Playgrounds can teach us far more than they first appear: from the geological and ecological history under our feet, to the heritage plaques and monuments commemorating long-forgotten city icons, to the easter eggs hidden in the park's architecture and design.

Shout out Earthscape Play, the company that designed Grange Park and St. James Park playgrounds.

2. Accessible Tours

Dates: August 2 & 3, though almost all of the tours you read about here are wheelchair accessible. See the event descriptions for more info.

Description: Come see Toronto’s original waterfront, walk/roll along an underground river, and experience firsthand the impacts of 12,000 year old glaciers upon Toronto — without the stairs or bumpy trails. These tours will begin and end at accessible subway stations, the walking paths will be paved, and the pace will be more moderate than my typical tours.

Picture this: you spend the morning on a paved AODA-accessible trail while learning about the glaciers that carved out the city of Toronto. Don’t let your dreams just be dreams. That could be you.

3. Infrastructure Tour: “The Signal & The Noise”

Dates: August 8, 9, 10.

Description: A city block is a symphony of coordination, a miracle of systems design, a battleground of competing infrastructural priorities. For three hours, we will dissect a single intersection from top to bottom: telephone cables, streetlights, surveillance cameras, traffic lights, streetcar cables, municipal signage, sidewalk markings, street grates, water mains, internet cables, sewage pipes, subway tracks.

Be warned: after this tour, you will never be able to look at a normal city block the same way again.

4. A Special Guest Tour: “The Village People: Jewish History of Harbord”

Dates: July 20, August 4.

Description: I am delighted to introduce Rebecca Arshawsky, who will be leading a tour of Harbord Village’s Jewish history. Rebecca gave this tour at Jane’s Walk, and she was an absolute pro. This is a tour about the hidden markers of cultural memory that have built up over a century of Jewish history in Toronto. It’s a story that will be familiar to every ethnic group that has ever called Toronto home: immigration and resettlement, marginalization and allyship, tradition and assimilation.

I have it on good authority that this tour will pass by a legendary bakery. Plan accordingly.

5. Our classic fare! Ravine tours, waterfront tours, subway tours.

Dates: Scattered throughout the summer.

Description: In addition to all of these news offerings, there are plenty of one-off tours touching every part of this city. Come walk a ravine that would have been a highway (“The Nature of Transit”), see Toronto’s new river mouth (“The Death and Life of the Don”), ride across the city by subway (“The Sky is Blue but Toronto Is Bloor”), see the city’s original shoreline (“Where is Toronto’s Waterfront?”) and enjoy three hours in nature (“The City Beneath Toronto”).

We built a brand-new mouth for our city’s major river. You should probably come see it.

These tours tend to fill up quite quickly, so I recommend securing your spot fast.

I’m buzzing with excitement for everything that’s in store. I feel very lucky that these tours allow me to meet so many incredible people living in Toronto, and that we get to figure out together what it means to call this place home. Whether you have joined several tours before or this is your first time, I cannot wait to explore the city with you this summer.

Yours in exploration,
Matthew Jordan
hiddenrivers.ca