Will a CCTV-lined route keep me safe — or just help police identify my body?

It’s 10pm on a Friday and I’m deliberately avoiding the main road on my walk home from the Tube. Instead, I’m following the edge of Richmond Green, taking a slightly longer route down a cobbled pavement lined with CCTV cameras. It feels counterintuitive: I’ve spent years being told to avoid parks and green spaces after dark. But according to Safest Way — a new route-planning app designed around personal safety — this is technically the safer route back to my flat. Or as much as you can call any route safe, I guess. Will extra CCTV cameras deter an attacker — or simply help police identify my body afterwards?

That grim internal calculation, which most women have made at some point, is exactly what Safest Way is tapping into. The free app launched in London and several other UK cities this year, promising to give users the “safest” route from A to B using public data on street lighting, CCTV coverage and violent crime. There are three route options: the fastest, the safest and a “balanced” one in between.

More than 10,000 people — overwhelmingly women and overwhelmingly Londoners — have already downloaded the app and I’ve been intrigued to try it. Five years after the murder of south Londoner Sarah Everard prompted a national reckoning around women’s safety, many of us feel no safer walking home at night than we did before. In fact, many of us feel more afraid. Stories about violence against women remain relentless, misogynistic influencers such as Andrew Tate continue to dominate corners of the internet and most women still instinctively perform the same nightly rituals.

“Taking the long route home, never wearing headphones after dark, texting friends to say they’re safe — the list of daily actions taken by women and girls to survive is long and rooted in injustice,” says Rebecca Goshawk of Solace Women’s Aid. Jamie Klingler, co-founder of Reclaim These Streets, is a little more blunt. “A better app would be one to identify predatory and violent men and police officers.”

It’s hard to argue with Goshawk or Klingler. Sure, it’s great to have new tools to help us get home safely, but what about the root cause of the problem: the perpetrators? Doesn’t this just put the onus on the victim? “A shameful and damning indictment of the state of London in 2026”, “treating the symptom rather than the cause” and “how about an app that continually reminds men not to rape people?” are among the comments I’ve seen from sceptics since Safest Way was announced.

And yet, the uncomfortable truth is that many of us already modify our behaviour every day. Co-founders Alesja Gilvear and Ilya Ilyankou — a product manager and a geospatial researcher — are keenly aware of the criticism, but their motivations are well-meaning and they have clearly spent a long time thinking about how women move through cities.

Street crime professors from UCL and King’s and a retired Google executive are among their team of advisers. The technology is rooted in research, combining multiple sources of public information. Roads with a lamp-post every 30 metres are classified as fully lit. According to the app’s data, the most well-lit borough is the City of London, at 86 per cent fully lit, followed by Hackney at 77 per cent.

Bottom of the list is Harrow, with only 16 per cent of roads fully lit, and I am surprised to discover my new borough of Richmond also scores relatively poorly — largely because of its vast green spaces and residential streets. My walk home from the station scores 6/10 on the app’s safety scale, three points lower than my old route in Clapham, close to where Everard was abducted. Was I wrong to feel so safe here?

That, perhaps, is the app’s biggest complication. Everard was not kidnapped from an unlit alleyway or deserted park, but from a busy, well-lit road. No app can fully account for human behaviour, randomness or predatory violence — and Ilyankou is careful not to overpromise on this. Safest Way, he says, is not designed to guarantee safety, only to provide more information. “The data already exists,” he tells me. “We’re just giving people access to it so they can make more informed decisions.”

That notion of information as empowerment is ultimately the app’s strongest defence. One of Safest Way’s early beta testers, yoga instructor Jackie Childs from Wimbledon, compares it to changing your route because of football crowds or traffic. “People should stop attacking women,” she says. “But in the meantime, let’s do what we can to keep ourselves safe… People need to stop breaking into houses, too — but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to lock my front door.”

Childs’s words ring in my head long after I close the app. Safest Way has become her navigation app of choice, but she still chose to walk through a housing estate en route to an afternoon appointment the other day — just as I’m still choosing to take an alley to Tesco during the day because I like the wisteria.

What I will do now, however, is have Safest Way in my arsenal whenever I find myself navigating somewhere new — especially at night. The app will not solve violence against women. But I also know there will be situations where I don’t have local knowledge to rely on: leaving a friend’s flat in an unfamiliar postcode; walking back from a new gym class late at night. A little navy logo on my screen won’t necessarily make me feel safer. But it might make me feel slightly less in the dark.