BerlinArea: Offline City Guide

ElmanGroup

About this app

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 the destination to Google Maps when you ask for it.

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 one 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 the front wall, not from a path that runs near 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

The Cold War, Prussian Berlin, Berlin in one day, Kreuzberg, Prenzlauer Berg, Charlottenburg, the vanished city, and one with children. Every walk 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.

YOUR PASSPORT

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.

LISTEN

Every place is read aloud in English by one recorded narrator. Twenty five of them run about ninety seconds and are written for the ear. Nothing plays until you press play.

GETTING AROUND

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 AND FILTERS

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 by category and only those places stay on the map. 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

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.

PRIVACY

No account, no sign-up, no ads, no tracking. The location permission draws your dot on the map and tells you which side of the old border you are on. It stays on the phone and is not sent anywhere.

BerlinArea is a private project and is not affiliated with the State of Berlin.