A Look Inside the Intensive Training and Testing Required to Become a Taxi Driver in London

Great Big Story went inside the driving force of London, The Knowledge Point Taxi school and the legendarily difficult exam they administer to hopeful taxi drivers. These students study for at least four years in order to become a human GPS, learning every corner of the city and memorize over 25,000 street names.

Imagine a world without GPS or sat navs, one where you’d have to commit to memory thousands of streets and landmarks just to get around town. For London’s black cab drivers, that’s all a part of the job. In order to get behind the wheel, drivers must pass The Knowledge, universally regarded as the world’s toughest taxi test.