The London Black Cab: Licence, Knowledge and the Modern Fleet

The vehicle is the least interesting part. What makes a black cab tour different from a car with a driver in it is the licence behind the wheel — an examination that takes most people three to four years to pass, and a set of vehicle rules that has shaped the same silhouette for seventy years.

Licensed since the seventeenth century

London's hackney carriage trade has been regulated since the 1600s. That is the oldest continuously licensed taxi trade in the world, and it is why the vocabulary is so odd: a licensed London taxi is legally a hackney carriage, its driver is licensed separately from its vehicle, and both licences are issued by Transport for London.

Two rights come with the licence and neither belongs to a minicab. A hackney carriage may be hailed in the street, and it may use bus lanes and a handful of roads — The Mall among them — that are closed to most traffic. On a sightseeing run those two rights are worth more than any feature of the vehicle.

The Knowledge of London: 320 runs

Every licensed driver has passed the Knowledge. Transport for London sets a book of 320 routes, called runs, and a candidate must learn all of them. Learning a run is not learning a line on a map: TfL requires the streets and landmarks within a quarter-mile of each end of every one, across a six-mile radius of Charing Cross.

TfL's own guidance says it typically takes three to four years. Candidates are tested face to face, repeatedly, and most fail appearances before they pass. Stage 6 adds twenty-five further routes for the suburban sectors.

Green badge, yellow badge

There are two grades. An All-London driver holds a green badge and may work the whole of Greater London. A suburban driver holds a yellow badge and works one sector of it. Every tour listed here operates in central London, which is All-London territory.

The licence covers the person, not the company. That is why the reviews name drivers rather than firms, and why travellers on these listings so often ask for one by name.

Driver-guide or Blue Badge guide

Passing the Knowledge makes somebody an expert in the streets. It does not, by itself, make them a qualified tourist guide. Some drivers hold both, and one tour listed here names the badges it employs: Blue Badge, City of London, City of Westminster, and Clerkenwell and Islington.

The rest guide as licensed cabbies, which is what the trade has always done, and the reviews suggest the distinction matters less than the individual. What it does change is the depth on a themed route. If a guiding qualification matters to you, the Christmas lights run is the one that publishes its badges.

Why the cab is shaped the way it is

A London taxi looks like nothing else because it is built to a rulebook nobody else follows. TfL's Conditions of Fitness set out what a vehicle must do before it can be licensed here: it must turn in the width of a London street, it must carry a wheelchair user, and the passenger compartment must have a certain headroom and a separate partition.

The accessibility rule is absolute, and for some travellers it is the most useful fact here. In TfL's own words: "All taxis licensed by us are required to be wheelchair accessible and are automatically designated for the purposes of Section 165 at the point of licensing." No other sightseeing format in London can say that about its whole fleet.

From the FX4 to the electric TX

The shape most people picture is the Austin FX4, built from 1958 and still working London's streets in the 1990s. The TX range replaced it, keeping the proportions and the turning ability while adding a ramp and a wheelchair bay.

The fleet is now changing again, on a published deadline. Since 1 January 2018 every taxi presented for licensing in London for the first time has had to be Zero Emission Capable. Older diesel cabs come off the road at twelve or fifteen years depending on their engine, so the diesel fleet is retiring itself on a timetable.

One tour listed here sells the electric cab as the point of the product, glass roof included. It is also the one that will meet you at an airport — the details are on the pickup and routes page.

What all of that buys you in the back seat

Four things, and none of them is comfort. A driver who can be redirected without losing the thread. A vehicle allowed on roads a coach cannot use. A wheelchair bay as standard rather than as a request. And a fare that hires the whole cab, so the cost divides across everybody in it.

That is the whole case for the format, and it is why the same complaint recurs in the reviews — traffic against a fixed clock — while almost nobody complains about what they saw. The full set of comments is on the reviews page, and what each landmark gives you from the kerb is on what a tour stops at.

To see the tours themselves, the London black cab sightseeing tours are set out with their hours and their fares on Black Cab London Tours.