Abbey Road (Or, why you should actually check the TFL website before you travel)

I'm making a concerted effort to do more exploring - too much time over the past couple of weeks was spent watching TV. So yesterday Portobello Road Market, today Abbey Road!
It was supposed to be a fairly straightforward journey: west on Central to Bond St., north on the Jubilee Line to St. John's Wood.
Now, there's a website, tfl.gov.uk, that is supposed to be the site for all your traveling around London on public transportation needs. However, it sucks. There's a journey planner that, in theory, is great: type where you're starting and where you're going and it tells you how to get there. It always has really shitty suggestions though, that involve like two interchanges, a bus ride, and a trip on National Rail Services, when looking at the tube map shows you can just make one change and you're good to go. So I never check the TFL's website anymore, and today I paid the price for it.
No Central Line service at Mile End today.
That's all right, I think to myself. There are always other options in London. So I take the Hammersmith&City Line to Liverpool Street Station, where the Central Line is working, and take that west to Bond Street, to switch to the Jubilee Line as planned.
Except there's no Jubilee Line interchange at Bond Street today.
So I get on Bakerloo at Oxford Circus instead and go on it to Edgware Road and hoof it up to Abbey Road, all the while thinking that I should have just stayed home today and not bothered with any tourist-y stuff.
I was rather surprised by the area that I walked through on my way up to Abbey Road. Abbey Road's in Westminster, which is a quite posh borough of London (though perhaps not as posh as The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which is where Notting Hill is), or so I thought. I guess Westminster is big enough to have a bit of diversity to it, and the part on Edgware Road was surprisingly un-posh, with many of the same kind of little grocery stores and halal butchers that are all over the place around Mile End. The further north I walked the nicer it got though, but still not what I would call posh: it kinda reminded me of the Upper West Side of Manhattan: definitely moneyed but not old enough (or at least gauche enough) to make it interesting.
Anyway, Abbey Road Studios is still a recording studio today, though the wall outside scrawled all over in black Sharpie with presumably people's names (I couldn't be bothered to actually read any of the graffiti) and, perplexingly, "Pink Floyd RULES!" and the half dozen Italian tourists holding up traffic tips one off that it's not an ordinary recording studio.
So I guess this is a good time to give a little "only in Britain" lesson. First, go look at the cover of Abbey Road; Google its image you peers of mine and Mom and Dad, you can go pull it off the bookshelf in the living room. See how they're crossing an intersection that has white stripes painted on it? That's called a zebra crossing here (get it? black and white stripes...) and pedestrians have the absolute right of way at zebra crossings the moment they put their foot on them. So actually it's not too horrible that there are probably at least a dozen tourists walking across the "most famous zebra crossing in London" as the Abbey Road Studios website oh-so-modestly refers to it, because they do have right of way and it's not like cars have to break specially for them, they'd have to anyway. It's just that there are always tourists having their "I'm exactly like every other person who has ever visited this corner of London" moment, whereas other zebra crossings in London are zebra crossings, and don't have traffic lights, because there isn't enough foot traffic to need a more formal crosswalk.
So anyway, I feel better now that I've visited Abbey Road. It was one of those things that I knew that I would never forgive myself for not doing while here in London, though it's really not that scintillating a thing to do if you don't have three friends with you to recreate the cover...