There are fewer than 20,000 licensed black-cab drivers remaining in London, yet despite the inception of G.P.S. navigation systems, all of them are still exhaustively schooled in the geography of a conurbation so massive, so old, and so storied that its epithets—the Great Wen, the Smoke—conjure up primordial images of a chaotic, infective environment.
How extraordinary it would be to have the cabbies’ learning (or “nous” in Cockney), which consists of not simply knowing the names of every single street and notable building within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross but also how to drive the shortest distance between any two of them.
