LondonLore
Discover London’s Legends with Your AI Guide.
Now Available on the App StoreHighlights
LondonLore
Your AI guide narrates the legends behind the Blue Plaques. Chat to it like a real guide (think Janet Street Porter meets Stephen Fry). Ask it anything, extend the story. You’re part of it now.
londonlore.uk-
Plan bespoke walks with your AI Guide. Organize around a theme like musicians, writers, or scientists. Or ask for a walk within your local borough.
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Dig beneath the surface. Tap the mic to ask follow-ups: “How long did they live here?” “What was their greatest achievement?”
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Slide up for the full story. Open the card to read more, see their home with the plaque in place, and jump to the Wikipedia page the data comes from.
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Works everywhere. From the settee, to the city, to the Underground. Your guide just works, thanks to the local Gemma model that lives within the app.
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837 stories, waiting for you. Collect them by borough, by theme. Every plaque you visit is stored automatically on your device. This is your LondonLore history.
Tech stack
What Makes it Tick?
Your guide is smarter about routing than most apps twice its size. Phone, cloud, or a cost-capped proxy, it picks whichever keeps you talking without blowing the budget.
30K
people watched the idea land on LinkedIn
2
models on board, Claude in the cloud, Gemma on device
2.7GB
Gemma 3 4B, quantized so it isn’t locked to the newest iPhones
100
free questions a month, plus 30 walk plans, then bring your own key
It started as a post. 30k people watched the idea land on LinkedIn. This is what shipping it looks like.
The model router. One call site decides between device, cloud, or proxy for every request. Online, it upgrades to Claude; offline, it falls back to the device. Either way, there’s always an answer.
Gemma, on the device. Gemma 4 E2B looked better on paper, but it crashed an iPhone 14 outright: 6 GB of RAM isn’t enough once iOS takes its cut. Gemma 3 4B, quantized to 2.7 GB, fits, and keeps the guide talking with no signal at all.
BYOK: bring your own key. Thirty walk plans and a hundred voice questions come free every month, on my dime. Blow through that and drop in your own Claude API key: the shared quota steps aside and you’re on your own budget, not mine.
Spoken in any language. Gemma translates the narration locally before it’s read aloud, so it’s free, private, and fully offline. The cloud stays reserved for conversation, not bulk translation.
Private by default. Your conversations, profile, and saved plaques never leave your device. Only Claude calls go out, brokered through a single proxy; everything else stays put.