London (Eyewitness Travel Guides) - European Travel Books

Turtleback - 20 March, 2006 - DK ADULT
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By: DK Publishing
ISBN: 0756615461

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Reviews by readers

The One Best Guide to London

The City of London is one of the most fascinating urban areas on the planet. Its remarkable history, from its founding by the Romans and its long years as the center of the British Empire to its vibrant present as a cultural and commercial center provide venues of interest for almost everyone.

The Eyewitness Travel Guide to London packs an enormous amount of useful information into a single, easily portable guidebook. This guide includes a brief synopsis of London's long history, breakouts by area of what to see and do, traveler's tips on where to stay and where to eat, and survival information on how to get to, and around London. This last section includes vital information on how to get from the various airports into London itself.

This eyewitness guides come with the usual extensive collection of maps, photographs, and diagrams of attractions, along with short explanations on their respective histories. Enough information is provided to allow the discerning traveler to plan a vacation and to determine when to visit popular tourist attractions such as the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, and St. Paul's Cathedral. The guide also include information on many attractions that are off the beaten tourist path, such as London's many smaller museums that offer unique collections for public view. The guide includes a number of useful internet web page addresses where visitors can check the latest information on operating hours.

This guide is highly recommended to the traveler planning a visit to London.

Smart, User-Friendly Guidebook Has Legs After Your Trip to London

From Lonely Planet to the Rough Guides, location-specific guidebooks generally seem so transient since a purchase generally depends upon an upcoming trip and soon afterward ends up in a storage box collecting dust or on craigslist for sale. That's not to say they don't have valuable information when you need them, but there is no incentive to return to the book once the trip has ended. The one exception to the rule is the series of Dorling Kindersley's Eyewitness Travel Guides. The London guide is as good as any in the series as it presents a graphically pleasing, intuitively organized guidebook with detailed pictorials that show animated aerial shots of neighborhoods like Covent Garden or cut-away floor plans of heavily visited buildings like Westminster Abbey or the Tate. It also helps make geographic sense of neighborhoods that allow you to navigate easily through them by pointing out recommended sights.

The first part of the book presents a timeline history of London that is both interesting and useful, as events are cross-referenced to sights you would want to see there. There is a well-presented survival guide toward the end of the book that highlights important travel information as well as recommendations on where to stay, shop and eat. Moreover, there is a comprehensive street finder of central London which helps you navigate without the inconvenience of fold-out maps. All the information is contained within a user-friendly, laminated paperback format that slips easily into backpacks and holds up well against inclement weather (a particular plus in rainy London). For all its obvious benefits, the one that has the most resonance to me is the fact that the book makes a fine keepsake of the trip afterward given its colorfully glossy quality. Even though the price is on the higher end of such guides, it is well worth it for its lasting value after your trip.

Informative and easy-to-use resource

After looking through many other travel guides, mostly copy-dense volumes with only a section or two of color photos, I admit to having been skeptical of the utility of this large, colorful, profusely-illustrated book. Would it really have the in-depth info I wanted? I shouldn't have worried. When my wife and I took a vacation to London this spring, this (along with one or two more specialized guides) was the book we ended up taking with us.

This guide handily divides London up into several sections, and covers each in generous depth. The suggested walks and tourist highlights in each chapter came in handy, even if we never chose to follow them verbatim. The collection of maps in the back, as well as the more narrowly-focused illustrated maps in each section, was easy to read and pretty comprehensive. And because the illustrations are large and lavish, it was no problem finding the information we needed quickly (keeping us from having to stand on street corners thumbing frantically through guidebooks like, well, like tourists).

The general travel information at the back of the book also came in handy, although we found it odd that according to the authors, "travelers checks are the safest alternative to carrying large amounts of cash." In fact, we had absolutely no problem accessing our American bank accounts via British ATMs, which struck us as a far safer and more convenient process.

Many travel guides become obsolete very quickly. But the many illustrations in an "Eyewitness Travel Guide" make it a best-of photo album as much as a guidebook. I think this volume is one of the very few that may be worth hanging on to now that we're back home.

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