At last it’s here.

It was complete and ready to go in September, but for some reason it’s taken until now to get Aaron’s Time Machine: London up on the iPhone Apps Store.

But now it’s here, and for only £1.79 you can download one of the most unusual apps ever written for the iPhone.

Basically it’s a huge, gigantic old map illustrating a non-linear ebook. It covers London from Primrose Hill to Chelsea, from Deptford to Victoria Park, and if it were printed out full size (as you can zoom into it on the iPhone) it would measure 8 feet by 6 feet.

It’s London as it used to be in the early nineteenth century — no Shaftesbury Avenue, no Charing Cross Road, no King’s Cross, Victoria, no Waterloo — in fact no railways at all, as they hadn’t been invented.

There’s more. Much more.

Wherever you scroll on the map, you’ll discover little red blobs. Click on them and the map will flip, giving you details of an event which happened right on that spot last year — or two thousand years ago. You just don’t know what you’re going to find out next.

There are over 160 of these Events, scattered all across London.

There’s more.

If you’re within the map area, the Locate Button on the bottom left of the screen will locate your position on the old map. You can walk down streets that no longer exist. 

There’s more.

The Google button shows you where the event happened on today’s map.

There’s more.

Click on the Info button on the bottom right and you can submit Events for consideration in future upgrades of the App. It’s a WikiApp.

There will be more.

We’ve almost completed New York. We’re working on San Francisco, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Chicago, Athens and maybe more. It depends how well you like it.

If you can’t afford £1.79 (what are you doing with an iPhone?) you can download the free version, Aaron’s Time Machine: London Lyte! from the iPhone Apps Store. It covers the City of London and only has 20 Events compared with the full version.

Even if you’ve lived in London all your life, you will discover something you never knew before.

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