Visit London is the official visitor organisation for London. They receive public funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. They employ about 70 staff. They run a very important service encouraging tourists worldwide to visit our capital city. And their search engine is unexpectedly bloody useless. Here's why.
I'm going to test out Visit London's website by asking the question What special events are taking place in London tomorrow? That should be simple enough for London's official visitor website to answer. Let's see how they do.
Start here:The What's On Special Events homepage Three special events have been prominently highlighted at the top of the page, one of which is tomorrow's London Judo Festival at the ExCel exhibition centre. Sounds special enough... except that this event was cancelledthree weeks ago. Surely somebody should have noticed by now? Next on the page come three bookable events (none of them this weekend) followed by 14 special 'Features'. Only acouple of these featured events are taking place tomorrow. Most are weeks or even months away, including Trooping the Colour (4 months to go), the Tour de France Grand Départ (5 months) and the Notting Hill Carnival (6 months). Great for forward planning, but useless for the immediate future. Looks like we need to dig deeper. See the word 'tomorrow' just above 'Book Tickets'? Let's click on that...
Next:Show all special events for... tomorrow "You searched for all events, in Special events, for 10 Feb 2007 to 11 Feb 2007. Your search returned 870 results." Hang on, I only asked for events tomorrow, but this bungling website has decided I meant "tomorrow and the day after" instead. No I don't, I really only want tomorrow. I'll have to Refine the search myself...
Next:Refine your search - When? From 10 Feb 2007 to 10 Feb 2007 "Your search returned 854 results" What, seriously? 854 special events taking place in London tomorrow? That's fantastic - what a choice! Although this might make finding the really special events quite difficult, mightn't it? Let's start at the top of the list of 854 events and work our way down...
Event 1:20th Century Decorative Arts, Sothebys [30 Jan 2007 to 13 Mar 2007] Clicking through to the information page reveals that this is an evening course, run twice over three consecutive Tuesdays. It doesn't actually happen on a Saturday at all. It shouldn't be on the list.
Event 4:Act For Fun, Lantern, SW20 [1 Jan 2006 to 31 Dec 2007] Clicking through to the information page reveals that this is a paid-for theatre workshop which takes place every Tuesday evening in Raynes Park. It doesn't actually happen on a Saturday at all. It shouldn't be on the list.
Event 5 and Event 8 happen every Saturday, but you had to enrol your child several weeks ago. Event 6 happens every Tuesday and Event 7 every Thursday. Event 9 only happens on the final Friday of the month. And Event 10 isn't an event at all, it's the children's activity cart at the V&A. I don't know about you, but I've lost all interest in scrolling any further down the list. If there is an appropriate one-day-only event amongst the remaining 844 listed activities, I really can't be bothered to hunt it down.
The problem here is the incompetent design of the Visit London events database. Every event has been labelled according to its start and finish dates, not by the dates on which it actually happens. Most recurring events have been labelled "1 Jan 2006 to 31 Dec 2007" and so apparently happen every day for two years, even though they don't. And the database isn't being updated properly either. It's no good searching for events by date at all, because all you get is a sprawling inaccurate date-irrelevant list.
I rue the relentless rise of database-driven websites. No longer are we treated to carefully considered internet pages written by sentient humans, just computer-generated lists created from input search criteria. You can't just browse any more, you have to ask questions first. And the Visit London database can't answer those questions properly, and so churns out garbage instead. What a waste of a potentially very useful resource.
I wanted to contact Visit London to tell them what I thought of their wholly ineffective search engine, except they insist I register with the site before they'll let me email them. Stuff that. So I've had to find some proper special events happening in London tomorrow via othersources. Much easier. Here's five, if you're interested:
URGENT EMAIL ALERT TO ALL LONDONERS: Final snowfall imminent
London 00:00: The Met Office has issued a warning that heavy snowfall is imminent across the Greater London area. Snow cover up to a depth of several inches is anticipated over the next few hours. This is expected to be the heaviest snowstorm seen in the capital for several years. And, thanks to global warming, it will also be the last.
That's right. Southeast England is getting warmer, thanks to the greenhouse effect. And this means no more snow, ever. Future London winters will be much too mild for the white stuff. We might get a bit of sleet maybe, but nothing more than that - nothing that'll ever settle. It's an absolute meteorological certainty, honest it is. No more snow.
It's your own fault, you know. You've been busy burning fuel and driving cars and heating offices and consuming goods and flying planes, and all of this extra carbon in the atmosphere adds up. Our climate is about to be altered permanently and irrevocably, and soon. Which means that today's snowfall will be London's last. You'd better use the day wisely.
We urge you to take the day off work. Come on. If today is London's last ever day of snow, you don't want to miss it. It'll all have melted by tonight, so this really is your last chance. You don't want to be stuck in the office when you could be outdoors enjoying the snow cover instead. Have one last snowball fight, perhaps, just like when you were a kid. Go stomp around on the pavement leaving deep crunchy footprints. Satisfy your creative urges by building a snowman on your front doorstep. Or knock together a makeshift sledge and go skidding headfirst down that treacherous slope in your local park. You know you want to. Take the day off and enjoy some 'proper' winter weather.
Come on, taking the day off will be easy. It only takes a single flake of snow for London's transport network to grind to a halt, and we're expecting several million flakes this morning. There's no point in going to the station or waiting at the bus stop because everything will be cancelled. And even if by some freak your service is running, just phone into the office and pretend that it isn't. They'll believe you, because it's snowing. And it's the last time you'll ever be able to use this excuse, so you'd better use it while you can.
Wrap up warm, grab your camera and go take some photographs of London in the snow. Drifts along the Embankment; Green Park beneath a carpet of white; swirling grey clouds viewed from Primrose Hill; Big Ben with frosty pinnacles; your house with flake-topped tiles; the lot. Take as many photographs as you possibly can. Take hundreds, thousands if necessary, because you'll never be able to take these photos again. Store them away to show your children, and grandchildren, because they'll never see London in white. And neither will you, after today.
Final snowfall is imminent. Make the most of it.
Disclaimer: It is just possible that estimates of today's snow depth may have been wildly over-exaggerated. Over-dramatic weather forecasts occur, all too frequently, for which we apologise. In which case you've already missed London's last proper snowy day, which was way back in December 2000. Sorry we forgot to warn you at the time.
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.
The English Tourist Board has just launched a special promotional website called England Rocks, which lists locations you might want to visit in search of our nation's pop and rock heritage. If you can spare the time waiting for the site to load, they've mapped and listed 186 suggestions for places to go. I can see why a true fan might want to visit Dusty Springfield's grave or the Cornish venue where Queen made their debut, but some of the other suggestions for a rock pilgrimage are plainly ridiculous. Jarvis Cocker's boyhood wet fish stall, anyone, or maybe the Reading watermill featured on the cover of Black Sabbath's eponymous first album? I think not. Anyway, I'd like to propose the following as the website's most ludicrous music-related tourist suggestion:
"Grimsby: The town's trawler boats, lights, candy floss and fairground at the pier provided inspiration for Elton John's song, Grimsby - "Oh oh Grimsby/a thousand delights/Couldn't match the sweet sights/Of my Grimsby/Oh England you're fair/But there’s none to compare with my Grimsby". www.visitgrimsby.co.uk"
We urge you to take the day off work. Come on. If today is London's last ever day of snow, you don't want to miss it. It'll all have melted by tonight, so this really is your last chance. You don't want to be stuck in the office when you could be outdoors enjoying the snow cover instead. Have one last snowball fight, perhaps, just like when you were a kid. Go stomp around on the pavement leaving deep crunchy footprints. Satisfy your creative urges by building a snowman on your front doorstep. Or knock together a makeshift sledge and go skidding headfirst down that treacherous slope in your local park. You know you want to. Take the day off and enjoy some 'proper' winter weather.
We urge you to take the day off work. Come on. If today is London's last ever day of snow, you don't want to miss it. It'll all have melted by tonight, so this really is your last chance. You don't want to be stuck in the office when you could be outdoors enjoying the snow cover instead. Have one last snowball fight, perhaps, just like when you were a kid. Go stomp around on the pavement leaving deep crunchy footprints. Satisfy your creative urges by building a snowman on your front doorstep. Or knock together a makeshift sledge and go skidding headfirst down that treacherous slope in your local park. You know you want to. Take the day off and enjoy some 'proper' winter weather.