If you have practically no knowledge of London, how easy is it to negotiate a difficult journey? It's difficult, You have no idea of the distances between stations of the complications between switching between one line and the other.

Going around London on the tube with a paper Tube Map when you don't really know the place. Pretty stressful.

Stick the journey in the Tube App and out comes a few sentences telling you the quickest route there. That app has practically given you a cabbie's knowledge without years of riding around London on a scooter.

No it's not, millions do it every single week. The map of the underground is one of the easiest maps to read.

F**k me! Words fail me.

Is the London Underground map great? Yes. A complicated map brilliantly executed.

But we're talking about someone with no knowledge of London. Even finding the stations they need is going to be a pain. I deliberately said a difficult journey.

Judging by the LU map, a journey that looks the easiest could take twice the time than it would take a Londoner who knows the Underground.

A good tube app will absolutely wipe the floor with the paper map for a new visitor to London.

Having live in London and used the tube daily I have seen at first hand how easy people find their way round the system, unless you have a decent net connection your app is as useful as a dumb map.

There is also the reduced risk of not having tourists wandering around with £400 smartphones in their hands.

Er, the app is in your phone. It doesn't require a connection. If it did, there is wifi across the majority of the underground (Virgin).

Second, the point of it is to let it work your route out before you set off. You are most unlikely to need any more than 2 changes, and unless you have the memory of a goldfish, most routes you won't need to remind yourself.

Even if you did, you can leave the route up on your screen so you need only glance at it.

Next, you haven't seen any such thing. You have seen many thousands of people, but you have no clue how experienced they are, or how hard or easy they find it to use the system, or would do if it was their first day in the system. Most of them will likely be doing the same old. Once you know where you're going, it doesn't really apply, does it?

Half the people on the train will be doing something on their phones. Don't have nightmares. If prone to nightmares and paranoid in case a mugger is on your shoulder, write the route on a scrap of paper. Though there is little that shouts "TOURIST" as loudly as someone poring over their tube map.

Tube maps can be misleading if you were in Oxford st and you wanted to go to Bayswater you go central line to nott hill gate the c&d line to bayswater on the map. But i'd get off at Queensway and cross the road outside. The app tells you, the paper map doesn't, for the layman the app is better.

El Barb endorses Mintball's suggestion of: By Tube, Liverpool Street ,snip> on the Circle, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines,<edited to remove first option> to Euston Square, and walk the short distance back down Euston Road.

This is very similar to the directions I cribbed from Google Maps. The Tube Aps will probably offer the same suggestion.

Do you think that someone with no knowledge of London would have been able to figure that out by looking at the London Underground map? You KNOW they wouldn't.

Really? You know what I witnessed for the whole 16 years I lived and worked in Central London? Wow!



And you could also get the tube from Leicester Sq to Piccadilly Circus like I did the first time I went there on my own, a few idiosyncrasies do not render the map useless.

There are three tools I'd recommend to any tourist in London.
1. The tube map.
2. The A-Z of London.
3. Engage one's own brain.

If one can't navigate successfully with those (as people have done for ages now), one really ought to have stayed in one's cave.

Apps are fine, if you like that kind of thing.
My basic knowledge of London came from the three tools I mentioned 40-odd years ago and I have no need for a smartphone.
Would I have learned as well from an app? I'm not sure.

No you wouldn't.

The main thing you would have missed out on is the context of the street you are walking down, even with a four inch mobile phone screen you aren't going to understand where you are in context with the rest of the city unless you zoom so far out that the four inch view becomes unreadable.

Its a problem with satnavs in general that you become so conditioned with simply following the voice that you lose all interest in your surroundings and often could not point on a "normal" map to indicate where in the country you are with any sort of accuracy.

I am shortly to go back on the road again in my job and at the weekend I plugged in my rather old (now) satnav to find that it wouldn't boot up and the screen appears to have been sat on at some point - it went in the bin and I'm now wondering whether or not its viable to replace it with another or simply buy another road atlas - bear in mind that I could be asked to drive anywhere from the tip of Scotland down to Birmingham (and beyond) and be diverted en route - two minutes with a road map is all you really need to re-order your day and when someone calls at lunchtime and says "You're in Scotland today, when you've finished in Dumfries can you just pop across to Inverness", then ten seconds later having glanced at the road map you can tell them where to get off.

I know London like a cabbie does with working for London Transport, the tube map is easy to understand but i was just commenting that if it's your very first time the app is easier.

I wouldn't use it, but then i wouldn't even use a tube map anymore but that's only from using it everyday, i even know bus links like the back of my hand but when i first came i used the tube for journeys which i now know were unnecessary.

I'd dispute that.
It's a combination thing, there are other clues combined with the poring over the map that shout "Tourist", those clues combined with an app shout "Tourist with a smartphone".
The style of dress, the type of rucksack, the guidebook entitled Londres, the immediate checking of the long map above the carriage window upon boarding the tube, the giggle at the "Mind the gap" announcement, even the way of looking around ... these are some of the real clues.

...and not having the appearance of a zombie drained of blood and personality as you travel to and from work each day.

You been following me again?