Take Me Home

Show me the way to go home

One of the pleasures of moving to a new city is learning your way around – but what if technology means we never get lost again?

London has some strange and twisted corners, and its incomprehensible traffic regulations and confusing maze of one-way streets are pleasantly intimidating to some of our foreign visitors, especially some Americans. Once you've got used to the nice wide American streets, in a neat grid of alternating streets and avenues, clearly numbered to simplify your navigation requirements, some of London's tangled medieval streets, in many places designed for a couple of horses to pass comfortably, can seem completely bonkers.

A powerful emblem of London's pride in its own byzantine complexity is The Knowledge, that ritualised memory game which ensures not everyone has what it takes to drive a black cab. Yet most minicabs I take now are driven by people with knowledge provide by Tom Tom, or Garmin, or Mio. It's become convenient to know the exact post code of the people you're going to visit, so that the driver can get a lock on your target destination more quickly. When you're returning home after a heavy night, the sat-nav's blinking interface is now as much a part of the drunken ride home as your sleepy companion or the bittersweet pop music on Heart or Magic radio, tuned too high to block out but too quietly for you to be able to reasonably ask that it be lowered.

I started my driving life in South Africa and have only just started driving in London, and I'm torn: the gadget-head in me knows that it's a perfect opportunity to stick a sat-nav on the dash and see what this technology is all about. It will stop me getting lost as I concentrate on driving. There's also a marriage to preserve. When a sat-nav gets it wrong, no one has to stop the car "to cool off," and no one else has to explain that they meant the other East Finchley turn off, which some people would have realised if they weren't so bloody stubborn.

And yet – surely it's cheating? Surely the knowledge of London's grimy fly-blown streets should be hard won: turn left at the Hoover Factory and hum the Elvis Costello song to yourself; surf the horrors of the Holloway Road every grim day of your commute; go into orbit around London on the M25 and discover for yourself its Bermuda-Triangle like ability to make vehicles mysteriously vanish from where they belong and make them reappear somewhere quite other. Knowledge, built up like coral, through trial and error.

The end-game for sat-nav systems is a world in which GPS chips get integrated into our phones. Eventually affluent people in the developed world will start to forget what it was like to be lost - just as we are all beginning to forget what research was like before Google. I suspect I shall crack and get one of these little information devils: it's probably safer than arguing over the torn pages of a coffee-stained atlas at 50 mph. It's just that I'd quite like it to be my London, not London according to TomTom, or Garmin, or Mio. What do you think? Does sat-nav make your life better or worse?

Let me know.