Yes, it’s one of London’s worst-kept secrets - it’s often possible to get around London much more effectively (and pleasantly) with just a mini A-to-Z and a good pair of shoes than it is with an Oyster Card and a tube map.
And yet, in case there were any of us that didn’t already know this, insurance firm PruHealth has selflessly sought to remind us by publishing a vaguely useful map that provides spurious estimates of the number of paces required to walk between adjacent tube stations.
Of course the exact details of the map don’t really stand up to close inspection and, as pointed by Diamond Geezer, some of the shoddier media commentary around the health benefits of walking between stations seems to have entered the outer realms of extreme fantasy. (236 calories in a chicken tikka masala? Yeah right.)
But still, there’s no doubting that it can be quite empowering to remove your face from the armpit of your fellow commuter (or vice versa) and conduct part of your commute under your own steam. And provided you don’t suck in too many lungfuls of traffic fumes, it’s probably not an entirely unhealthy option either. Make sure you take a good brolly, though.
Picture taken from Joe Hastings’ Flickr photostream under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence.
