Finding My Way Around Town (Retrospective)

Now back in sunny California, and spending several hours a day writing down details and impressions of England. Here's the first, taking off from where the very first post left off:

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Finding My Way Around Town

My first evening in London, I was jet-lagged and miserable. I had gotten in the late morning to a temporary accommodation in the form of a small room in a very lovely (but compact) flat near Blackfriars. She lived right on the river Thames, in a flat stuffed with antique furniture and knick-knacks from all over the world. There were African statues alongside old tea pots that had been so well used they were permanently stained dark brown inside.

I remember the keys: old style keys- with a long straight body and knobby handle and small chubby part at the end to unlock the door. These were the kind of keys that had probably been around for many decades—if not approaching a century or more. The porter at the apartment block gave me the keys to the apartment (since Trisha, who owned the apartment, was off on vacation). It took me about fifteen minutes to figure out how to open her door—which way to turn the keys and which way to push.
…Not to mention that it also took me about twenty minutes to figure out how to find her apartment. It ought to have been simple enough #27 River Court: River Court was the apartment complex, 27 the flat. Second floor, right? Wrong. I went up the elevator to the second floor only to find that those were flats 10-14 or something like that. So I got off on every floor until I found hers on the fifth floor, if I remember correctly.

This was but a foreshadowing for how difficult it was going to be for me to find my way around town. An American, I was used to a very sanitized system of numbering for addresses: even numbered houses on one side, odds on the other side of the street—such that the numbers went up and down at the same rate on either side of the street. Not so in London. You could have houses #50, #54 and #60 across from #5 #7 and #9—so if you were looking for #20 you wouldn’t know whether to walk up or down the street. (Theoretically, it should be on the same side as the even numbers, but then it could be that the pattern changed at the end of the block…. Not to mention that the street names themselves changed about every other block.)

I remember at some point telling a few friends, facetiously, that I thought the confusion of London streets was intentional and somehow in keeping with the legacy of a class-based society: the city was designed so that you had to be an insider to find your way. It didn’t help at all that I was basically born without the part of my brain that would have governed navigation. As my parents often teased, I could get lost walking around my own home block.

My initial method for finding my way when I had appointments was to find my destination on google maps before I left home--—and then I’d write down the directions on a sheet of paper I’d take with me. For example: tube to Bond Street, right on Oxford Street, a right two blocks down, etc. But that method inevitably got me horribly lost, and most of the time, asking people on the street to help would just exacerbate the situation. My first day at work—volunteering at the Jubilee Debt Campaign to get started with my research—I was trying to find my way to their office building in Charles Square near Old Street. Trisha had pointed out the route to me that morning on a map. But five minutes out of the tube, I was completely disoriented. I asked person after person if they knew where Charles Square was, but not a single person did: not shop owners, not businessmen, no one. At one point, I was standing right at the corner of Charles Square asking passersby, and they all shrugged their shoulders. They weren’t being impolite. There were just a lot of small streets around and if you didn’t happen to work or live on Charles Square, you wouldn’t know where it was.

After enough pitiful apologies to friends and colleagues for being ridiculously late (even though I got lost literally only a few blocks away from what I was trying to find), I realized I needed a better solution.

Then, I was finally able to get a cell phone contract (which first required a bank account, which in turn required all kinds of documentation about employment that was basically impossible for me to provide, given that I was a graduate student in the United States… but that is another story altogether.) So my second attempted method to find my way around town was to get a mobile phone with a GPS system on it, so that it could literally tell me how to find my way. That would have been a brilliant solution if it the GPS system actually worked. In most cases, it took ten to fifteen minutes to find my current location via the satellites- if it ever did at all. I was so frustrated that I stopped trying to use it. In retrospect, since I was usually far more than fifteen minutes late, I probably should have at least turned it on.

Finally, my options exhausted, I broke down and bought a mini “A to Z” book (called an “A to Zed”) which if memory serves I bought in the kiosk at the Green Park tube stop one day when I knew I was about to be very lost heading to a very important interview. The book was filled with small maps of every neighborhood in central London, and was literally a life-saver. Or at least a career-saver. And friend-saver.

And from thence on, I never got lost.

Okay, okay. I still got lost. I just didn’t get super ridiculously laughably lost.