Covent Garden is a great place to spend a long, hot day. Quickly, you can find yourself lost in a maze of boutique shops and bars.
So, Google Maps to the rescue. Except… Covent Garden is a digital desert. Try to use your phone here and the scourge of the buffering wheel awaits.
This is a national problem: the UK has fallen to 60th in the global league table of mobile networks. The country is covered in not-spots and slow miles where getting online can feel impossible. I’m not the first to notice this. The Conservative MP and now Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat took to X over the summer to complain that he had better signal in Kabul ten years ago than he does in London today.
Mapping Britain’s mobile coverage
Britain’s mobile network is falling ever further behind the rest of the world. It’s bad for economic growth and personal safety – and it’s also just plain annoying.
That’s why LFG joined forces with Buffering Britain, a campaign group aiming to highlight, then solve this pressing issue. Campaign Director Ben Cope and Head of Policy and Operations Jack Rowlett have released an app that lets people monitor the speed of their mobile connection while they go about their day. Users can then submit their data to an online map showing where the mobile network is really failing people. Cope and Rowlett plan to use this data to hold local and national politicians to account, and make the case for building and upgrading more mobile masts.
Here Comes the Chicken
Together, we got talking to Fred Parry, founder of Chicken Rush. Fred puts on massive games of adult hide-and-seek across central London. Players use an app to hunt down a giant chicken, completing challenges along the way. Unfortunately, the app relies on mobile signal to work, and players sometimes complain when the signal drops.
So we spotted an opportunity to collaborate. Why not put on a massive LFG x Buffering Britain x Chicken Rush game in Soho and Covent Garden? Using both the Chicken Rush and Buffering Britain apps, players could have fun in the last of the September sunshine and contribute data to help fix Britain’s phone network.
On Saturday 19 September, the plan came to life. Dozens of participants booked ahead of time, while others simply saw the chicken and joined in on the day. Ben made a speech identifying the key barriers to a better network. Many of these will be familiar to LFG supporters: a broken planning system makes it too expensive and slow to bring new masts online. But the regulator Ofcom is also partly to blame, with official statistics often hiding how bad the problem really is.
With our players split into several teams, the hunt began. Throughout the afternoon, the chicken’s GPS location was gradually narrowed down on the app. In the meantime, LFG supporters, the Buffering Britain team and Chicken Rush enthusiasts competed to win points.
After two hours, the chicken was finally found in his hiding place at The King’s Head where the players gathered for drinks and discussion. The day was a big success. But the signal? Not so much. More than 160 new tests were completed, identifying more than 60 spots with dismal speeds and more than 20 with no connection whatsoever.
What’s Next?
Buffering Britain is in the final stages of preparing a policy report with the Centre for British Progress. They will also use the data collected during our event to make a splash as Holborn and St Pancras prepare to go to the polls in a few weeks’ time. And, of course, the LFG x Buffering Britain collaboration will continue.
More on that soon!
Jack Richardson sits on the Committee of Looking for Growth’s Westminster Chapter. Professionally, he works as a freelance journalist, mainly covering the aerospace and defence sector.