Fifty Memory Palace Locations You Already Know

The best memory palace locations are places you can already walk through in your head without stopping to think: the homes you have lived in and visited, your schools and workplaces, the route you take every morning, and the shops, gyms and stations you use every week. Fifty of them follow in nine groups with a rough count of the stops each gives, then a five-minute test for any candidate, the stops common jobs need, and what to do when a palace fills up. If placing pictures along a route is new to you, the method of loci guide explains the technique itself.

Where the good places come from

Alex Mullen, a three-time World Memory Champion, once built his palaces from photographs of places he liked, and the new ones "often don't stick very well." He switched to "places I already know well, specifically ones that I can visualize decently without a picture reference," and a single brainstorming session gave him more than a hundred. Walking each one in his head and writing the stops down as he went, at "a semi-relaxed pace of 50 loci per 10 minutes," he added about two thousand stops in a few weeks.

His worksheet for the brainstorm says to "Think through entire life, including family, friends, etc." and lists homes, schools, workplaces, city centres, neighbourhoods, restaurants, gyms, libraries, cinemas, shops, parks, routes, transit centres, holidays and event venues. That breadth is nothing new: Quintilian, writing in the first century, describes the method with a large house and adds that it "can equally well be done in connexion with public buildings, a long journey, the ramparts of a city, or even pictures."

The counts below assume one to five stops per room or area. Mullen takes five ("Generally, I select five loci per room/area"), but fewer, bigger stops are easier to start with, and the counts are rough on purpose, since your grandmother's kitchen holds however many memorable things it holds.

Fifty places you already know

Homes, yours and other people's

1. The home you live in now is the place you know best but also the one that changes most, which is why the method of loci guide points a first palace elsewhere. If you use it, hang the stops on fixtures such as the front door, the sink and the bath, not on furniture; a small flat gives ten to twenty.
2. The house you grew up in is the classic first palace, because its layout stopped changing when you left. Two floors and a garden give thirty to fifty stops; finish one floor before you climb to the next.
3. A grandparent's house tends to keep its furniture for decades (the clock, the glass cabinet, the chair nobody else sat in), and such objects make ten to twenty-five distinct stops.
4. A friend's home you visit often is known in parts, usually the hall, kitchen, living room and bathroom, which give five to fifteen stops, plenty for a short list.
5. A flat or room you used to rent, student halls included, often beats your present home because it stays as it was on the day you left, and gives ten to twenty stops.
6. The shared parts of your building run from the street door past the post boxes and up the stairs to your own door, five to ten stops, but landings look alike, so use only one.
7. Your garden, yard or balcony carries a home palace outdoors, where the gate, the path, the shed, the washing line and the back fence give five to ten stops that follow on from the back door.
8. A family holiday place, whether a caravan, a cabin or a relative's flat by the sea, is small but full of the detail childhood summers leave behind, five to ten stops.

School and university

9. Your primary school is often remembered in surprising detail, from the gate and the coat pegs to your classroom and the hall, and walked in the order of a school day it gives twenty to forty stops.
10. Your secondary or high school is remembered by timetable, so follow an ordinary day's lessons through the corridors, one stop per classroom, for thirty or more stops already in order.
11. The changing room and the sports hall are compact and full of distinct things, such as lockers, benches, showers and the lines on the court, for about ten stops; Mullen's high school swimming locker room is one of his palaces.
12. A university campus gives a stop per building on the walk between lecture halls, library, canteen and halls of residence, and any building you knew from the inside can later become a palace of its own.
13. A classroom you sat in for a year holds about ten stops if you choose points far enough apart, such as the door, the front desk, the screen, the window, your seat and the back row.

Work

14. Your current workplace, walked from the entrance past your desk to the kitchen, the meeting rooms and the printer, gives ten to twenty-five stops; where desks move, use the doors and windows.
15. A job you used to have, especially behind the counter of a café, shop or bar, is known from the staff side, and walked in the order a shift ran it gives ten to twenty stops.
16. A workshop, ward or kitchen you trained in is remembered by its equipment, each piece in a fixed place, which gives about fifteen distinct stops.

Commutes and streets

Routes deserve more attention than they get: in two experiments by Massen and colleagues, people told to place their stops on their route to work "recall significantly more items in a memory test" than people told to use a route in their house. The abstract does not say why, though our guess (not the authors') is that the stops on a route differ from one another more than the rooms of one house do.

17. Your walk to work or school gives fifteen to thirty stops (the gate, the corner, the crossing, the bakery, the bus stop), already in the direction you walk it each morning.
18. The bus or train line you ride gives one stop per station, in order on the map, and since stations built to one design look alike, put each image on what differs, such as the name board or the kiosk.
19. A drive you make every week gives fifteen to thirty stops at junctions, roundabouts and landmarks, as long as you use only what you would notice from the driver's seat.
20. Your neighbourhood loop, the dog walk or the run you could do half asleep, gives ten to twenty stops, and because it ends where it starts, a full walk of it is easy to check.
21. Your high street or main street gives a stop per shop front, twenty to forty if you walk up one side and back down the other, and one of Mullen's palaces is St. Paul Street in Baltimore.
22. The centre of a city you know well strings squares, statues, churches and bridges into a route of twenty or more stops, and no two of them look alike.
23. Your car is a small palace you carry around, where the dashboard, glovebox, front seats, back seat and boot make six to eight stops, enough for a list before you walk into a shop.

Shops, cafés and restaurants

24. Your usual supermarket is walked in the same order every week, so its aisles give fifteen to thirty stops and a shopping list placed along them sorts itself into the order you shop. A refit does not matter, since the palace is the layout you remember.
25. A shopping centre or mall gives a stop per shop along each level, twenty to fifty in all, with each level working like a floor of a house.
26. A café you go to often makes a small palace of six to ten stops, from the door and the counter to the coffee machine and your usual table.
27. A favourite restaurant gives five to ten stops, from the coat stand and the bar to your table and the kitchen door.
28. A DIY or hardware shop has aisles you know by what they sell, such as paint, timber and plumbing, so each is a distinct stop, ten to twenty in all.
29. A bookshop you browse in keeps its sections in a fixed order, from the sale table by the door to the cookery shelves at the back, for eight to fifteen stops.
30. A weekly market needs care because traders move, so use only its fixed points, such as the fountain, the clock and the stall that has stood on the corner for years.

Public buildings and venues

31. Your local library runs from the entrance past the desk, the children's section and the computers to the shelves, ten to twenty stops in a usually quiet building.
32. Your gym gives a stop per machine in the order of your usual circuit, ten to twenty-five stops of quite different shapes.
33. A swimming pool gives eight to twelve stops, from the turnstile, the lockers and the showers to the shallow end, the deep end and the diving board.
34. A cinema runs from the box office past the snack counter and the ticket check to the screen, six to ten stops.
35. A place of worship you know well is quiet and full of fixed, distinctive objects, such as the doors, the font, the pews and the altar, for eight to fifteen stops.
36. A museum you have visited many times gives a stop per exhibit you can picture, in gallery order, and a familiar museum can supply thirty.
37. A station or airport you pass through often gives ten to twenty stops from the entrance through the ticket hall and security to the platforms or the gates.
38. A stadium, theatre or concert hall runs from the turnstile up the stairs to your seat and on to the stage or the pitch, and Mullen uses a university's music auditorium for one subject.
39. Your doctor's or dentist's surgery is small and never changes, and reception, the waiting room, the corridor and the chair give five to eight stops.

Parks and the outdoors

40. A park you walk in gives ten to twenty stops, such as the gates, the pond, the bandstand and the café.
41. A playground has equipment built to differ from one piece to the next, so the swings, the slide, the roundabout, the climbing frame and the sandpit make an easy first palace for a child.
42. A beach you know runs from the car park past the lifeguard hut and the rock pools to the pier, eight to fifteen stops, and the seaside boardwalk stock palace is a ready-made walk of the same kind, out to the end of a pier.
43. A hiking trail gives ten to twenty stops at the trailhead, the bridges, the viewpoints and the summit, and the work is in choosing which views to keep.
44. A golf course comes with eighteen holes in a fixed order, and a tee, a fairway and a green on each give up to fifty-four stops to someone who plays it.

Travel

45. A hotel you stayed in for a week gives eight to fifteen stops, from the lobby and the lift along the corridor to your room, the breakfast room and the pool.
46. A city you explored on holiday works if you walked the same streets several times, so give each landmark on your best-remembered walk a stop, and build it soon after you get home, while the details are sharp.
47. A ferry or long-distance train you travelled on has its decks or carriages in order, and the ones you walked through often give five to fifteen stops.

Places you know from a screen

The method of loci guide warns against palaces you have only imagined, and for a palace you mean to keep for years that warning stands, but a place you know from a screen can still carry a shorter job. In a 2012 study at the University of Alberta, people who briefly studied a virtual environment and used it for ten lists of eleven unrelated words did as well as people using a highly familiar place, each measured against a group given no instructions. The authors confine the result to people new to the method and to word lists.

48. A video game map you have played for hundreds of hours is a place you navigated rather than imagined, so use it for short jobs and keep real places for anything you want to keep.
49. The set of a television series you know well can hold a short list, as in Mullen's example of a list of insulin upregulators placed in "Turk and JD's apartment from the TV show Scrubs," because Turk has diabetes.
50. One of the six stock palaces on this site, each with 12 to 16 rooms in a fixed walking order, is the fallback when nothing above passes the test below. Choose the one you can picture most easily.

Test a place before you trust it

A place earns a palace when you can walk it in your head without hesitating. Five checks take about five minutes, and four of them come from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a Roman handbook for public speakers.

Walk it with your eyes closed. Name each stop aloud at an even pace, because, as Quintilian puts it, "the first task is to secure that there shall be no delay in finding any single detail." Swap any stop you have to search for, or embellish a hazy one the way Mullen does, so that "a forgettable foyer becomes a fountain."

Walk it backwards. The handbook wants stops "in a series" so that you can start anywhere, "whether we go forwards or backwards," and if you can name them in reverse, the order is truly yours.

Look for twins. A row of lockers or six identical landings causes the trouble the handbook describes with a row of columns, whose "resemblance to one another will so confuse him that he will no longer know what he has set in each background." Keep one of each kind, or give each twin a mark of its own.

Check size and spacing. Stops should be "of moderate size and medium extent," because a huge one makes the image vague and a tiny one leaves it no room. A whole car park as one stop is too big, and a light switch beside a socket is two stops too close together.

Empty it. The handbook would rather find places "in a deserted than in a populous region," because crowds "confuse and weaken the impress of the images," so picture the supermarket after closing time and the station at dawn.

When a place passes, write its stops down and number them. The handbook also marks every fifth stop, putting "a golden hand" on the fifth and an acquaintance named Decimus on the tenth, so that you never lose count on a long route.

How many stops the job needs

Size the palace to the job and leave a few spare stops at the end. Each figure below comes from the guide beside it, which also explains how to turn the material into pictures.

Build your first palace at ten to twenty stops, the size of most everyday jobs, and save the big places on the list, such as the school, the high street and the supermarket, for a deck or a long list. Spread images out rather than piling them up: Mullen finds it "much better to create more loci with fewer images on each than to stuff many images into fewer loci," and keeps to one to three per stop. The deck's eighteen stops are no exception, because PAO turns three cards into a single picture.

Reuse a palace or build another

What to do with a full palace depends on how long you need what is in it. For short-term things Mullen reuses: "I keep a few palaces on hand and 'overwrite' my images again and again when I want to memorize something quickly." For speed cards he cycles through ten palaces, and by the time he is back at the first, a week or two later, the old images "are gone, or at most very faint."

For anything he means to keep, such as medicine or a language, he says "I never reuse palaces I've already filled," since overwriting one would mean "having both old and new images in the same loci." He does go back to a palace to add to its own topic, choosing a new stop in the locker room for a new fact that belongs there, and if you must reuse a palace for something new, his fix is to shift the viewpoint at each stop: "if you focused on the TV's screen initially, focus on its top instead."

That makes the list above a budget, since every job you want to keep needs a palace of its own, and Mullen keeps a spreadsheet of candidates, "coloring in the ones I've already used and noting what I used them for." When a palace runs out, extend it, so that a house continues into its garden and down the street and one route runs into the next. Mullen likewise uses as many stops as each place will give, about 3,000 across 80 palaces for competitions, and "some have 200, some have 20."

Palaces need walking, too. The ones Mullen made but did not review would "fade away," while once he added new palaces to his flashcard reviews, "after a week or two they're ingrained in my memory."

Start today on this site

Pick three candidates from the list, run the five-minute test on each, and keep the one that passes most easily. Write its stops down in walking order, ten to twenty of them, before you open anything.

In the palace builder you name the palace, click on the blank plan to drop each stop, and name it in the list below, which keeps the stops in walking order and lets you move any of them up or down. Pen and line tools sketch walls around the dots, a palace can have more than one floor, and you can trace over a photo of the place. The builder saves once at least three stops are named and keeps the palace in the browser you built it in.

The palace then opens on its own page, already among your palaces, where you pin an entry from one of your decks or the whole dictionary to each stop. "Walk this palace" steps through the pinned stops in order, "Practice this palace" appears once three stops are filled, and "Edit palace" adds stops or floors later; editing a stock palace you have adopted saves a copy of your own.

Then come back at widening gaps. Within an hour of placing the images, walk the route once and repair any image that has gone faint; that is part of building, not a review. Walk it again the next day, then about six days later and about sixteen days after that, then monthly for anything you want to keep. The palace drill shows only the stops that are due, counting never-reviewed ones as due now, most overdue first and at most 20 a session, and you grade each one easy, hard or miss. It does not send reminders, so put the review days in your calendar; the spaced repetition guide explains where the gaps come from.