Ay Crumbs-ba! A new way to see a city
An lecturer once gave me a priceless piece of advice. His view was that if you wanted to see a city... get up and out early to see it as it wakes up.... walk everywhere, get lost, say hello to people... embrace and engage. Every nook and cranny. Explore. Explore. Explore.
My recent 30x30 Nature Challenge, allowed me to rediscover my hometown.. finding spots such as Cody Dock, London Zoo and a few of the Royal Parks. But sometimes it’s good to have a helping hand....
The Crumbs App is a new way to explore a city.. the premise of the app is that rather than following a Lonely Planet guide or joining a walking tour, you are your own tour guide.... you’ve downloaded Crumbs Trail and it’ll take you to the sights and discover other curiosities along the way... on a kind of treasure hunt following the crumbs.
The “crumbs” are either clues spotted as you walk along or answers to questions the app throws at you. For bonus points you can also search for hidden gems, along the route.
I’d chosen the London Bridge tour to test out Crumbs. It’s an area that I’d lived and worked in, but that I hadn’t been to for ages. I also figured having Borough Market nearby was a bonus. Crumbs has plenty of choices of trails from Kew Gardens, to Trafalgar Sq to the Eiffel Tower.
It was easy to find the start point, pretty intuitive to use the app and work out where you were meant to be looking for the next crumb. As I worked through the clues and the trivia, it dawned on my how the hustle and bustle of daily city life makes you blind to what’s around. You don’t usually have time to stand and stare, to realize what gems lie here and there. Returning with Crumbs there was that time to see a lot of new cool things, I learnt a lot about an area I thought I knew well.
Crumbs is a novel way to explore somewhere.. if you love history, exploring the stories behind the buildings and a bit of a treasure hunt, this is the app for you... If you just want to get from AtoB as soon as you can, it maybe not for you.
For me. I liked it, but perhaps there were a few too many questions... you could end up spending more time looking at your phone rather than the surrounds (but that may just have been me testing this out too early on a weekend).
It’d also be great to be able to skip questions and I’d also like to see areas such as Dalston, Deptford, Bermondsey and Peckham added to the list... but I’m sure we’ll see the developers look to improve the features and add new locations.
Overall, Crumbs is a novel way to get to know city. Yes, there’s room for improvement, but it’s got a solid base to build on... so get exploring!
The Crumbs App is available on iTunes and Android via Google Play. There is a free Trafalgar Sq trail and you can get an additional free trail with the code “crumbs16”.