Getting Lost on the Underground

Is it just me or does everyone else have a massive problem with finding their way around London, despite having done it a million times with a tube map in hand?

I don’t know if it’s my memory, or whether I am just fundamentally female when it comes to navigational skills but I am ashamed of my general lack of knowledge of where things are. Personally I blame TFL. Unless you have lived in London for 20 years and have a full body tattoo of the District line and its friends, I think it’s nigh on impossible.

When asking my friends/colleagues about my ‘problem’, I am always faced with the same answer. An answer that fills me with dread and a general feeling of uselessness. ‘I just know,’ they say casually. ‘Well how do you just bloody know?’ I scream incredulously to a sea of shocked faces. ‘When you do it every day, you just get to know,’ they sheepishly reply, apparently in fear of another frustrated outburst from their inept associate. I give up.

In an effort to join my friends in the know, I find a tube map and study it. I try to find some sort of pattern that everyone else gets the hang of and which enables my intrepid tube sharers to have an inflated knowledge of London’s transport network whilst I faff about with my pocket-sized map (which, incidentally, doesn’t even fit in my pocket).

There’s nothing. No special coding. No easy option to memorise routes. I’m at a loss. Then it occurs to me that maybe I just don’t get out much.

Maybe I should venture on the tube a little more often? Start to jump on and off and explore our city regularly and maybe I’d ‘just know’. I could be in the gang, talk knowledgably about how slow the District line is and how the longest elevator of any tube station is at Angel.

As I tire of all these energetic thoughts, I decide that maybe it isn’t so imperative that I know all this off-hand and that even the most organised of professional young women don’t need to have their local transport system etched into their already very busy minds. 

How is anyone supposed to know what stations are closest to what landmarks and what lines cross where? I barely know what colour each one is let alone where it goes. I get out my iPhone to distract myself from my obvious inadequacies and in a flash of inspiration thanks to Apple, I remember: there’s an app for that.

Image by Annnie Mole courtesy of Flickr