I wouldn’t normally rush to promote a new feature on a booking site like lastminute.com, but I have to give them credit for this really clever idea. They’ve used Google Maps to create custom “London Walks” that cover about a ten different parts of town. It looks very simple when you first go to the main London Walks page, but once you click around a bit you’ll see there is a lot there and it’s really nicely done.
Each of the walks they’ve laid out are in or through a specific part of London, and with one click you’ll see the entire route on a Google Map, with the starting and ending locations listed. Once you click to get more details on that specific walk it will show you a more zoomed-in version of the map, with quite a few markers along the route. You’ll see which specific things you should be looking for along the way, and there are photos of many of the things so you’ll be able to recognize them once you get there.
They range from 1.9 miles up to 3.9 miles, with estimated times ranging from 2 hours to 4 hours. As of now a couple things on the site don’t seem to be working right, but most of it is behaving brilliantly. I don’t know if I’d do any of these walks exactly as they recommend, and if I did I’m sure it would take me less time than they guess, but I’m still extremely impressed by this idea and its execution, and I think it could be really fun for people who are planning their first visit to London.
Here are the main walks, although there seem to be a couple of others in another menu, which doesn’t always seem to work correctly as of now:
- South Bank
Westminster to Tower of London - City of London
St Paul’s to Brick Lane - Primrose Hill
Camden to Little Venice - Westminster
Downing Street to Piccadilly - Hyde Park
Hyde Park Corner to Holland Park - Chelsea
Sloane Square to Knightsbridge - Hampstead
Archway to Hampstead village - Greenwich
Greenwich to Blackheath - West End
Piccadilly Circus to Embankment
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We shared an orange: a lot of our poleglo.
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