Tucker

@Butts1977 @CharlieM_OBE Theme parks are shit, full stop. Spend all day queuing or walking between rides and if you're lucky, 4 or 5 actual rides of a couple of mins each. Expensive, shit day out.

@CharlieM_OBE Theme parks in the UK are shit anyway. In USA they stay open until late, fireworks etc. In the summer here we close them before the sun goes down. Clueless. Thanks for the saving Rach. 😂

Cost of living crisis and Rachel Reeves cuts VAT on trips to Legoland !!!

@TaxiManTips @michaelblackcab @journeymanstev1 Try and relax mate

@michaelblackcab @journeymanstev1 Depends if I’m pob or not 🤣 otherwise I’d be like a red rag to a bull with something like this

This is why our temperament needs to be tested by going through the Knowledge of London 🙏🏼

@johnbuzzroll @SatanicTaxi @michaelblackcab Absolutely. No point getting wound up every time another driver makes a cock up. Nothing happened and it's not personal, so just carry on.

@SatanicTaxi @michaelblackcab We get this all day everyday. Like you I just let it go. It’s part of the job and what sets us apart. 👍

@riseagain666 @UnitedCabbies Yup. And all that grief for a job to Sloane Sq. It's a hard pass from me

@UnitedCabbies Wont get anywhere near the embankment, and if you do, you cant get off it. I'll fuck it off like every year

Chelsea Flower Show 2026: The Chelsea Flower Show organisers have shared their initial requirements with the Cab Ranks Committee as follows: Taxis will need to use Chelsea Embankment for all drop offs and pick-ups as shuttle buses will again be pulling into the Bull Ring. Monday 18th May: Please could we have taxis available along Chelsea Embankment from around 8.30pm with a second wave of departures around 10.30pm. Tuesday 19th May - Friday 22nd May: Show opening hours are 8am-8pm. On the Friday we have a late event finishing at 10pm but for a much smaller amount of people. Saturday 23rd May: Show opening hours are 8am-5:30pm and the sell off begins at 4pm. Please could taxis begin arriving from 3:30pm onwards. A copy of the event map is below: Alongside Chelsea Flower Show is Chelsea in Bloom and details of this years displays can be accessed from the link below: chelseainbloom.co.uk

@CheshuntABC @ihtesham2005 @Anthony23Bryant 😂

@ihtesham2005 @Anthony23Bryant You should see our willies….

To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years. A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain? Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever. The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since. Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city. They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail. The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through. Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth. If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find. She put 16 of them in an MRI machine. Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got. A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab. Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus. Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline. Maguire's study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan. The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way. So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time. She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again. The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction. The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work. There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about. The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another. When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real. She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal. The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory. That distinction is the entire study. Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest. The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them. The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do. The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it. Maguire died in early 2025. UCL's tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it. The answer is the part that should change how you live.

@scampo999 @ihtesham2005 @tony_taxiT Also, it's a lot more than half who fail to make the grade

@ihtesham2005 @tony_taxiT Excellent piece. Needs a few adjustments for accuracy. The KOL isn’t one exam, it’s a long process

@spongeworthy2 @barylskiy @ihtesham2005 It's a badly worded statement in the article. To clarify, it's not that the student has failed 12 times, but rather that in order to complete the Knowledge he/she has to go through a series of approx 12 tests before passing.

@barylskiy @ihtesham2005 The others give up? Good question.

@Grapes_O_Wrath @ihtesham2005 What you saw was probably an app on the screen for dispatching jobs, not a GPS device

@ihtesham2005 For the past few years whenever I have used a London black cab every driver without fail was using a sat nav. Is 'the knowledge' still necessary?

@TomTaxiDriver Any station or hotel to somewhere under a tenner.

Here’s a fun one. Would love to see some of your answers 80% of “X location” jobs go to “Y location” I’ll go first… 80% of Liverpool Street jobs go to London Bridge.

@Jayals12 @LTDAForum @TfLTPH Why would you even bother talking to the twat? Just let him cop the fine and learn the hard way.

Uber cuts across me and then drives down a taxi & bus only section of the strand. A quick chat with the driver to tell him that except access means only if he’s dropping off, or access to the royal courts of justice. He tells me it’s ok, I’m a taxi 😂 @TfLTPH educate these fools

@John_J_C_Moss @LTDAForum @EssexPoliceUK Let's hope so. Thanks for replying

@Tuckertaxi @LTDAForum @EssexPoliceUK This is something we have been working on for a few years. Until recently, Labour refused to consider a school street without a CPZ, but they have relented on that and we'd like to see this trialled. They will not do bollards or one-way routes. But that could change on Friday

@EssexPoliceUK I have just observed the driver of this vehicle inhaling gas from a balloon at seven thirty-ish in the morning and I do know that he will very shortly be driving his children to school. The location is The Croft Loughton

@SarcasticCdow I can better that. Accepted a Gett job and while en route the exact same job came through on Jump which I accepted and the cancelled the Gett job. Downside means that punters are ordering on multiple apps and taking whichever comes first but on that occasion it was a win for me.

Gett offers me a job w11. Circa £20 job. Think; I’ll reject it and give it 10 on the street and jump first. Min later Jump offers almost same job. 0.3 miles difference in journey distance. Jump nearly £26 after tip and commission Gett would have been £19.80 after comms.

@michaelblackcab But he's only little But he's only 3 But he'll sit on my lap But the last cab took us But we'll pay you extra I always refuse, yet the cab behind always seems to take them.

McLiver “how long to Regents Pk ?” “About 30-35 minutes, but I can only take 6” They were both sides so couldn’t see how many, looked like 7 & a child in a buggy. “We are 6” “You’re more than 6” “6 & a buggy” “That’s 7” “But only 6 people” “The child is 1, that’s 7” 🤷🏼‍♂️😂

@cabian2 Was about ten years ago but thinking about it still makes my blood boil

@Tuckertaxi Earl grey tea leaf

Adult leaves shrapnel tip, kid hoicks it.

@Hamishbutter 16, unless you turn it back to front then you're ok till retirement

At what age should cabbies stop wearing baseball caps?

@robafc123 @LTDAForum @michaelblackcab @D1ggaGa What tariff is 3.3p please? I am on Intelligent Octopus Go and it has been reduced from 7p to 5.2p which is still very good but 3.3p would be even better!

@michaelblackcab @D1ggaGa @LTDAForum You should only be paying 3.33p per KWH now - Octopus have passed on the government reduction from April and that's how it manifests itself. Thought I was losing it when I saw 3.33p on my bill!

I noticed the price of diesel when filling up this morning 👎🏼 Just to let any driver know if they’re having thoughts of swapping to a TXE especially if you can charge at home. My electric & petrol £30, that’s for 6 days coming in from Bromley. That’s 1.85 % of my takings 🙏🏼

@CabbieGinger @pf08234286 Rule of thumb is this: if he's close enough to see or hear you calling him a wanker, then he's probably a wanker.

@pf08234286 Cabby next to me said ‘cooor bit close that aye?’ I was like I actually don’t know. So the wonderful trade could decide. It’s ok as I got John O’Groats wait and return.

Hello johns. Just humour me, K5 TOD here in the silver begging box. Is that far enough away from me on the rank at 1Hotel to pick up, like he did? Just interested to know for future reference? Thanks. Up the Johns

@ShumBaloo @For_Film_Fans Add the Piccadilly Cafe on Glasshouse St to that list

This iswhen Soho was authentic The Pollo Bar, the Centrale. And Patisserie Valerie when it was real just a SINGLE shop/cafe - before it got merched ,corporatized into a chain

I miss THE STOCKPOT. Old Compton Street, Panton Street, Kings Road. Spag Bol - £1.50