Introduction
Since I live in London, you might well assume that I must be biased towards London taxicab drivers. But before you make that judgment, please read on and make your own independent judgement.
London’s streets
London’s streets are a complicated network that date back to the days when horses and carriages wound round the city. They weren’t nicely arranged in grids like the streets of Manhattan, for example. Nor were they planned round administrative districts to form a clockwise spiral around the River Seine, as in Paris.
No, London’s streets developed organically as needed to form what could be better described as a tangled network.
Today the iconic black taxicab is driven by an army of knowledgeable cab drivers, who know how to navigate the complex and irregular layout of London’s roughly 25,000 streets by the quickest route.
So much so, that they can’t become a licensed cab driver until they have passed the Knowledge of London — generally just referred to as the Knowledge.
Below is a map of central London showing how the streets are laid out.
