BerlinArea

BerlinArea is a guide to 127 places in Berlin: landmarks, museums, galleries, parks, playgrounds, churches, squares, and fifteen buildings that no longer stand. The map needs no connection. Berlin's vector tiles ship inside the app, drawn in sepia and gold rather than the usual grey road grid, and the photographs and texts are bundled too. You can land at BER with no SIM card and still use everything. Every place has a few paragraphs on its history, the year it was built, its address and a photograph. Directions hands it over to Apple Maps or Google Maps. The city that is gone. The Berliner Stadtschloss, the Palast der Republik that replaced it, the Anhalter Bahnhof, the Sportpalast, four of the five long-distance stations Berlin lost, and the border crossing on Bornholmer Strasse that opened first on the night of 9 November 1989. Each says the year it came down and what stands on the ground today. Where the Wall stood, drawn from Berlin's own 1989 survey of it. East and West are filled in from the first launch, so the two halves of the divided city are there before you touch a filter, with a line telling you which side you are standing on. Eight walks, from the Cold War and Prussian Berlin to Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg and one with children. Each is a line along real streets, not a straight line between pins, with the stops numbered on the map and a bar that steps you through them. It remembers where you stopped. A passport of stamps. Come within a hundred metres of a place and it stamps itself, or press the button on the place screen. The stamps make a poster of your route on parchment over the outline of the 1989 Wall, the places numbered in the order you reached them, ready to share. Then and now. Thirty places carry an archive photograph beside the modern one, each with its year. Hold the picture and it fades to the other, or open it full screen and wipe a handle between them. Listen. Twenty five places are read aloud in English, about ninety seconds each, written for the ear rather than the page. Nothing plays until you press play. Berlin transport, explained. What U, S, M, RE and F mean on the signs, what the zones are, and where a ticket is sold, online and at machines in the city. Search the map by name and every match is on it at once: type Rewe and you get all of them, type Brandenburg and you get the gate. Filter the map by category and only those places stay on it. Parks with a permanent playground have a filter of their own, and every playground says whether it is free, when it closes and whether it is seasonal. Save the ones worth coming back to; favourites live on the device. The practical half of a city is there when you need it and switched off until then: supermarkets, pharmacies, drugstores, brand shops, car dealers, petrol stations, charging points, car parks, cash machines and hotels. 5277 points from OpenStreetMap, chains and buildings only, so they are still there next year. Cycle mode draws 755 km of the Berlin cycle network over the map. It is still experimental. Thirteen languages: English, German, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Italian, French, Spanish, Azerbaijani, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Simplified Chinese. No account, no sign-up, no ads. The only thing that ever leaves the phone is a crash report, and only when the app fails. BerlinArea is a private project and is not affiliated with the State of Berlin.