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?

Tourists do a few things that irritate on tubes, one they talk, two they get off and just stand in front of the doorway looking left and right, three they stand on both sides of the esculator, four don't have their tickets ready at the gate, five spend forever and eternity at the ticket machines, other than that you wouldn't know they were there.

La Senora and I were once on a tube platform, might have been at The Angel, and a young couple with South East accents asked if we knew how to get to the Oxo Tower.
I was able to give them exact directions by tube and street, for which they thanked me.
The young chap must have clocked my slight Northern accent because he then asked me "You here for the weekend then?".
It was only later that I thought how odd that was.

Oh trust me, it's not just tourists that do those things.

Let's say you went on the tube 5 days a week, twice a day. Call it 500 trips a year. Let's say on average you encountered 1,000 other passengers a trip, which is probably highly conservative. That would be getting on for a million people, in round figures.

Unless you followed them all from start to finish, and asked each of them how easily they found their way around the system, then you couldn't know, by looking at them, how easily they were finding their way around the system. And that is even ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people you would see would be regular commuters, and so irrelevant to the issue.

I am assuming that you did not do this. So, yes, I "know" you "witnessed" no such thing as you claimed. It was a silly claim that you hadn't thought through. You have no data to go on to make any judgment how hard or easy anybody you failed to question had found their journey. Maybe 99% of them you observed either sat or stood in a tube, or moving along corridors or using escalators. Does a person who is finding a journey not straightforward look different going up an escalator than anyone else?
And most cases you "observed" in passing were not relevant anyway.


... but nobody was arguing the map is "useless".

... BG is regularly to be found blocking the doors while spitting and cursing at his tube map