Thursday, March 13, 2014

How to remember 3 London bridges

Yesterday I had a difficult meeting in central London that overran, but as a reward I had the pleasure of being able to take the river bus back to Putney.

On the way we passed under three bridges whose names confused me for a long time until I found a good mnemonic.

The three bridges, alphabetically, are Albert, Battersea and Chelsea, and on their strip of the river there is Battersea on the south side and Chelsea on the north, so they could be in any order (there are things named after Albert dotted all over London so it doesn't mean anything).

You might think that proximity to the iconic and highly visible Battersea Power Station (below) would be a clue as to the name of the nearest bridge, but no.
However it's easy to remember.

Just imagine yourself in a taxi, a classic London black cab, heading home to Putney after a good evening out in the West End, maybe seeing a film, concert or something, and you're driving along the Embankment, you'd see the bridges in this order:

- C helsea
- A lbert
- B attersea

Geddit? Just think taxi CAB and you can easily remember the order of those three bridges.
For how to remember some NY bridges, using BMW, head over to Bonnie's blog.

3 comments:

bonnie said...

Simple and effective! Thanks!

O Docker said...


I can never remember how to spell mnemonic.

Anonymous said...

Gene Yus