What It Takes to Go “the Data,” the “Insanely Laborious” Examination to Develop into a London Taxicab Driver


Any­one who’s fol­lowed the late Michael Apt­ed’s Up doc­u­males­taries is aware of that becom­ing a Lon­don cab dri­ver isn’t any imply feat. Tony Stroll­er, one of many collection’ most mem­o­rable par­tic­i­pants, was choose­ed on the age of sev­en from an East Finish pri­ma­ry college, already dis­tin­guished as a char­ac­ter by his ener­getic man­ner, clas­sic cock­ney accent, and enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly expressed ambi­tion to grow to be a jock­ey. By 21 Up, how­ev­er, he’d acquired off the horse and right into a taxi­cab — or was intention­ing to take action, hav­ing immersed him­self within the stud­ies required for the nec­es­sary licens­ing exams. For a lot of non-British view­ers, this con­sti­tut­ed an intro­duc­tion to what’s often known as “the Knowl­edge,” the for­mi­da­ble check­ing course of licensed Lon­don taxi­cab dri­vers have below­gone since 1865.

The Nice Massive Sto­ry video on the prime of the put up professional­vides an intro­duc­tion to this “insane­ly laborious check,” which calls for the mem­o­riza­tion of 320 routes round Lon­don, involv­ing 25,000 streets and roads, with­in a six-mile radius of Trafal­gar Sq.. “Its rig­ors have been likened to these required to earn a level in regulation or med­i­cine,” writes Jody Rosen in a 2014 New York Time Type Magazine­a­zine piece on the Knowl­edge.

“It’s with­out ques­tion a novel intel­lec­tu­al, psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal ordeal, demand­ing unnum­bered thou­sands of hours of immer­sive examine.” For the Tony Stroll­ers of the world, it has additionally lengthy provided a path to sta­ble, well-com­pen­sat­ed, and even pres­ti­gious work: each­one, regard­much less of social class, acknowl­edges the exper­tise of Lon­don that the black-taxi­cab dri­ver pos­sess­es.

In recent times, these clas­sic black cabs have confronted nice­ly inten­si­fied com­pe­ti­tion from rideshare and “mini­cab” ser­vices, whose dri­vers aren’t required to go the Knowl­edge. As a substitute, they depend on the identical factor the remainder of us do: GPS-enabled gadgets that auto­mat­i­cal­ly com­pute the route between level A and level B. Although one would imag­ine this tech­nol­o­gy hav­ing lengthy since ren­dered the Knowl­edge redun­dant, the circulation of aspi­rants to the sta­tus of black-cab dri­ver has­n’t dried up whole­ly. Take Tom the Taxi Dri­ver, a full-fledged Lon­don cab­bie who’s additionally mil­len­ni­al sufficient to have elab­o­price tat­toos and his personal Youtube chan­nel, on which he explains not simply the expe­ri­ence of dri­ving a taxi in Lon­don, but in addition of tak­ing the assessments to take action, which contain plot­ting Level-A-to-Level‑B routes ver­bal­ly, on the spot.

The ques­tion of whether or not the Knowl­edge beats the GPS is ready­tled on the chan­nel of anoth­er, sim­i­lar­ly named Eng­lish Youtu­ber: Tom Scott, who in the video above, dri­ves one route by means of Lon­don utilizing his cell phone whereas Tom the Taxi Dri­ver does anoth­er of the identical size whereas con­sult­ing solely his personal males­tal map of the town. This mod­ern-day John Hen­ry present­down is much less inter­est­ing for its out­come than for what we see alongside the way in which: Tom the Taxi Dri­ver’s per­cep­tion and expe­ri­ence of Lon­don dif­fer con­sid­er­ably from that of Tom the non-taxi dri­ver, and as neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic analysis has sug­gest­ed, that dif­fer­ence is prob­a­bly replicate­ed within the phys­i­cal nature of his mind.

“The pos­te­ri­or hip­pocam­pus, the realm of the mind recognized to be impor­tant for mem­o­ry, is massive­ger in Lon­don taxi dri­vers than in most peo­ple, and {that a} suc­cess­ful Knowl­edge candidate’s pos­te­ri­or hip­pocam­pus enlarges as he professional­gress­es by means of the check,” writes Rosen. The appli­cants’ hav­ing to mas­ter fine-grained element each geo­graph­ic and his­tor­i­cal (over a peri­od of close to­ly three years on aver­age) additionally below­scores that “the Knowl­edge stands for, properly, knowl­edge — for the Enlight­en­ment ide­al of ency­clo­pe­dic study­ing, for the human­ist notion that dili­gent intel­lec­tu­al endeav­or is ennobling, an finish in itself.” For any of us, behavior­u­al­ly offload­ing the lads­tal work of not simply wayfind­ing however remem­ber­ing, cal­cu­lat­ing, and far else apart from onto apps could properly induce a type of males­tal obe­si­ty, one we are able to solely struggle off by mas­ter­ing the Knowl­fringe of our personal pur­fits, what­ev­er these pur­fits could also be.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Development of Lon­don, from the Romans to the Twenty first Cen­tu­ry, Visu­al­ized in a Time-Lapse Ani­mat­ed Map

The Outdated­est Identified Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the Metropolis’s Nice Land­marks

“The Received­der­floor Map of Lon­don City,” the Icon­ic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Sub­manner Sys­tem

Meet Madame Inès Decour­celle, One of many Very First Feminine Taxi Dri­vers in Paris (Cir­ca 1908)

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His initiatives embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e-book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­e-book.



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