London's not an easy city to get the hang of, especially on foot. The London A-Z shows a myriad of intersecting streets, sideroads and alleyways - all extremely hard to memorise. Harry Beck'sUnderground map famously did away with the conventions of reality, reducing London to a simple series of lines and intersections. It's perfect for making linear tube journeys, but deceptive and misleading if used for finding your bearings on the street. How many tourists have hailed a taxi from Covent Garden to Temple when they should have walked, or tried walking from Barbican to Angel only to find the journey considerably further than it looked? What London's pedestrians need is a simpler mental picture of where places really are, and how to get from one to another.
And that's why a London Pedestrian Routemap[jpg] is now under development. This map condenses the complexity of central London's streets to a manageable network of colour-coded key routes. It's part of a 'spatial accessibility' research project put together by a Shoreditch consortium called Space Syntax, and may one day end up becoming semi-official. Highlighted routes include a main east-west axis from Notting Hill to Aldgate via Oxford Street, intersected by several north-south corridors. Parkland routes feature strongly, as do Thamesside walks and the Regent's Canal towpath. Overall the network is no more complex than the London tube map, giving it a good chance of being understood and internalised. Blimey, you might even find it useful.
The map is still work in progress, so it's easy to pick apart some of the design's current idiosyncrasies. The colours used aren't distinctive enough, for example, and too few street names are shown to help you to navigate around with any accuracy. But as a mental representation of essential London routes it does a fine job. If this new map encourages walking in the capital it can only be a good thing. And if it ever saves you from forking out a tenner on an unnecessary taxi, even better.
