Viv is getting her life back on track, quite literally one step at a time.

For about 10 years she was a rough sleeper. Bridges and parks in London's West End were her home.

Now, however, she leads walking tours around the streets of Covent Garden, giving a unique insight into an area usually known for its popular bars, theatres and restaurants.

Viv has been working for an enterprise called Unseen Tours for the last three years. Entertaining anecdotes about the Savoy Hotel and the ghosts believed to haunt the area contrast starkly with her tips on how to make a damp-proof bed using newspaper and cardboard and the best places to tuck yourself away from view at night so that you can avoid hassle, or worse, from passers-by.

Viv was born in Norway 57 years ago but moved to Britain in the late 1970s after meeting her future husband on an interrailing trip around Europe.

Together they bought a house in London - Viv's inheritance from her late father helped - and some years after that they had two children. However, Viv's relationship with her ex started to go steadily downhill.

Viv says: "He had been mentally violent before but he started being physically violent in front of the children. It was the last straw."

Viv didn't want her children, then aged eight and 10, to grow up in an environment where their parents were constantly at war.

"I thought it was better for them to have parents that were separate and happy rather than together and unhappy."

In the late 1990s Viv took the decision to leave the household. Her ex-husband, she discovered, had left her off the deeds to the house so she had no claim to a share.

Instead she sought help from various local councils in a bid to get council accommodation but she was deemed a low priority. In 1999, when help from friends ran out, she became homeless.

A stint at a women's hostel was so fraught with peril that Viv left after a few months.

"I had my room broken into three times. It was full of junkies and alcoholics," she tells me.

So Viv was out there on her own. People within the homeless community - Viv informs me that it is a community - gave her some assistance and she found places to sleep, such as outside Covent Garden's London Transport Museum and Shell Mex House, where she could reduce the potential risks.

She had something called a "street dad" - an older homeless man who kept an eye on her - and at one point she lived under Waterloo Bridge in a "bash," a makeshift home made from wooden pallets and whatever else could be found on the streets.

During this precarious period she saw her children on a regular basis although they were not aware of what was going on.

A few years ago, thanks to another homeless woman, she became involved with Unseen Tours and there has been no looking back.

Viv clearly takes pride in her role - people come on one of her tours from all around the globe and leave glowing reviews.

She dismisses claims that the tours are in any way voyeuristic.

"I think we open a lot of people's eyes. We are one tour that talks about homelessness. People tell me I have shown them sides of London that they never knew existed."

Viv now hopes to develop her walking tours further and to move into a flat next year with her long-term partner. Her gentle and open demeanour belie her years of hardship.

But when she tells me she was "very sad" to leave her children whom she did not want to uproot and that winters spent on the streets were "depressing," I feel she is putting on a brave front.

It is an irony that her children do not know that she slept rough for all those years whereas groups of strangers do. But just as the women who make up the hidden homeless are better off unseen, maybe some things in life are so painful they should remain unknown.