What it's like to navigate the city without a smartphone

Charing Cross to Hideaway Coffee, 1/7/25

It was a very hot day in London, and I wanted – I am a little embarrassed to admit – an iced mocha, very badly. So I sat on a bench bridging the seam of Platforms 1 and 2 of Charing Cross, laptop cooking my bare thighs, and searched Google Maps for coffee shops near me. Not very analog of me, I know.

Was I not in a city of 10 million people, with almost as many coffee shops? Why not walk around, eyes open? Because if I half-knew what I would find: a Caffe Concerto, one of a string tangled from the Strand to Covent Garden; the Waterstones Cafe, not a single table free; Prets a Manger. Chains using the gravitational pull engendered by their bulk to pull tourists and other thirsters.

To bypass the trap, I searched Google Maps. Of course, I found more traps. Every business in the world now has 4.7 stars. Ads and official listings bleed into each other.

Despite all of that, I am a digital native and Google Maps is my motherland. I searched “coffee.” I found a place that looked real and good. I checked its Instagram (the most recent post was a warning to its customers about a fake review scam). I read a clearly AI-generated article about it; it said this place was “digital detox zone.” I read a review from a customer that said it was a “good WiFi cafe.” I memorized the route: Strand, Pall Mall, Haymarket, landmark ice cream place, alleyway. I set off.

The city quickly flummoxed me: Trafalgar Square had its hood up for some mystery event; police stopped traffic and a line of limousines rolled by; I tried and failed to accelerate past a school trip, bollard-height children blocking my way. I put my odds of actually arriving at 60 percent.

I was like a fish in a stream, carried by the current of the water – only there was no water, and no iced mocha. Remember, it was very hot. I gave up and pointed diagonally, knowing I could reach a familiar place with air-conditioning in a block or five.

Not the map in question — they’re scattered across London. Shout out to bike rental stations!

I checked a stele wrapped in a map, the “you are here” symbol oriented helpfully forward (like, sometimes but not always, the Google Maps arrow). Haymarket. Great Windmill Street. I realized I was exactly where I’d intended to be, and only need to go straight.

I recognized places I’d been before, but never registered in my personal geography. The theatre where we’d sweated through the last performance of a period piece, sitting grimly through it in solidarity with the performers, in their cardigans and stockings. The cinema where we’d met to see – not Paddington in Peru, but something like Paddington in Peru.

Then: the ice cream shop, a long line stretching out the door. The alleyway, too clean to really be called an alleyway. And the little walled yard, an empty coffee shop at one end, and a full one at the other. My destination.

I arrived. A sign at the till helpfully informed me that as of 1 July, prices were going up. It was 1 July. I ordered an iced mocha with pea milk. The pea milk was free. I asked for the WiFi password. “We don’t have WiFi,” said the barista. “I was only going to use it to read short fiction for class,” I didn’t reply.

I took my drink and sat down at a metal chair in the shade. Sun blazed on the rest of the courtyard: diverse manifestations of London squinting at each other over hotter tables.

It was at this exact moment I realized: I had been here before. Like, here here. At this table. In front of this coffee shop. With this point of view. Just, long ago – I couldn’t tell you when, exactly, except that it was long enough that it feels like the memory of a different person; and it was a cooler day.

Just before Christmas, 2018? It couldn’t have been lockdown days; we stuck strictly to Brixton, then. The early days of my marriage? 2022? I don’t know. My credit card company and Google probably do.

A reminder that Google is, by default, keeping a record of every little thing you do with its products.

Such an improbable confluence of circumstances! That this coffee shop was open then and open now. That I should be so different and so similar: different enough for the memory to be lost, similar enough for it to be rediscovered. That I have an enduring weakness for fancy coffee.

I can just imagine myself navigating to this place back then: on Google Maps, head bent over my screen, focusing my mind on the little blue arrow intensely enough that my body would follow. And now: stopping every few minutes to search for a street sign, trying not to look too lost. Arriving, both times, to sit in the same place.

I took a sip of the mocha. It was the best I’ve ever had.