find.london lists a few thousand places across London and tries to put the right ones in front of you. The thing that makes it work is small: as you go, you tell it what you think of a place. Everything else on the site - the suggestions, the maps, what gets hidden - reads from that.
You can use the whole site without an account. Signing in is free and takes a code from an email; what it buys you is explained further down.
Finding something
There are five ways in, and they suit different moods.
Browse a category. Thirty-two of them, from Coffee and Bakeries to Monuments & Ruins and Beautiful Streets. Open the menu, or scroll the homepage. Every category page is a map and a list of the same places: pan the map and the list follows, tap a pin and the card opens.
Search. The magnifying glass sits to the left of the Saved marker at the top of every page. It searches every listing on the site by name, by neighbourhood, and by what a place is - "hot chocolate", "Borough Market", "bookshop". Misspellings are forgiven. Type a postcode or an address and it offers you what is nearby instead.
Nearby. What is within a short walk of where you are standing, which is the one to reach for when you are already out.
Neighbourhoods. Thirty areas, each with its own page: what is there, and a note on what the area is like.
Right Now. Tell it roughly what you feel like and when, and it suggests places and says why it picked them. This one is still in beta and takes a moment to think.
The four marks
Every listing has the same four buttons, and they are the whole system.
- Want to go - you like the sound of it. It goes on your Saved list. - Done - you have been. Still yours, filed differently. - Loved - you have been and it was good. Loved implies Done, so you cannot love somewhere you have not been. - Not interested - not for you. It disappears from every list, map and count on the site.
Want to go and Done are the same axis: intention, then history. Pressing Done clears Want to go, which is why they cannot both be lit.
Not interested is the useful one nobody presses at first. There is no penalty for using it: it is how you get the chains, the tourist traps and the whole category you do not care about out of your way.
Your saved places
Saved is everything you have marked, as a list and as a map. The count beside the marker at the top of the page is the number waiting there.
If the lists start feeling crowded with places you have already been, turn on Declutter in Settings: Done hides what you have been to, Done & Loved hides those as well. Nothing is deleted - decluttered places are still on Saved, and turning it off brings them back.
Making the suggestions yours
Swipe Mode is a deck of picture cards, each asking one question: do you like the idea of a city boat trip? Swipe right for yes, left for no, and Skip is under the card if you are not sure. There are three hundred of them and you will never be asked all of them - a couple of minutes is enough to change what you are shown.
Your answers live under Tailored for me on the Account page. Change one there, or clear it and the question comes back into the deck.
One setting matters more than the rest. Mode, in Settings, is Local, Neutral or Visitor: most locals have already seen Big Ben, and visitors have not, so the same query gives different answers depending on which you pick.
Signing in, and why
There is no password. Type your email address, we send a six-digit code, you type it back. The code lasts ten minutes and works once.
Without an account, everything you save is held on the device you saved it on. Sign in and your saves, your answers and your settings follow you between your phone and your laptop, and survive clearing your browser. That is the whole difference. An account is free, and you can delete it and everything in it from Advanced at the bottom of the Account page.
Connections
Connections lets you link up with people you know. You see what you have in common - the places you have both saved, or both loved - and the Feed shows what they have been marking.
Set your name in Settings first: invitations go out under it, and an invitation from nobody looks like spam. You can invite by email or by a link you pass on yourself.
Settings worth knowing
All of these are under Settings on the Account page, and all of them work signed out.
- Appearance - Light, Auto or Dark. - Mode - Local, Neutral or Visitor, as above. - Distances - miles or kilometres. - Directions - whether a map link opens Google Maps, Apple Maps or Citymapper. If the app is on your device it opens in the app. - Declutter - as above. - Offline map - keeps the map of London on this device. - Offline pictures - keeps the photographs too. Small is about 75 MB, Large about 356 MB. Turning it off deletes them.
Using it without a signal
The text and the data already work offline once you have opened the site: the listings, the write-ups, the addresses and your saves are all on the device. Only the map tiles and the photographs need saving, which is what those last two settings do.
The Underground is the obvious case. Turn the offline map on before you go down, and the site keeps working between stations.
You can also add find.london to your home screen from your browser's share menu, which gives it its own icon and opens it without the browser furniture.
When something is wrong
Every page has a feedback link at the foot, and it tells us which page you were on when you used it. If a place has closed, moved, changed its hours or is simply wrong, that is the fastest way to tell us - and if there is somewhere good we have missed, Contact is where to say so.