The Rough Guide to London - The Rough Guide > Reviews (1)

Rough Guide to London

The Rough Guide titles on various places and music are generally good value, with the facts well presented and arranged for ready reference, alongside informative and well-researched sections which can be read straight through almost cover-to-cover. This latest edition is no exception.

London

Although I have lived in Devon since childhood, I spent two very happy years at college in the city – or rather, on the western fringes, at Ealing – and enjoyed being within a short journey by public transport of the metropolis. I still make a point of trying to go there at regular intervals, even if only a day or an overnight stop. Although obviously certain aspects of London have hardly changed since my student days, other have, and I find it useful to be able to keep in touch with the 21st century capital. This book does the job very well.

The book

In the opening colour section, a short introduction reminds us of the sheer size of London, stretching over thirty miles from east to west, and with the largest population of any European capital. The next few pages are a quick round-up of what to see, when to go, and things not to miss, bearing in mind that it will take several trips to visit everything.

Twenty-odd pages cover the basics, like how to get there, City Transport once you’ve arrived, including taxis, buses, the underground and suburban train networks, boats along the Thames, cycling and driving if you must. Wild horses wouldn’t get me driving in London, but horses for courses (or something like that, and no jokes about horsemeat if you please). Festivals, which include fixtures such as the London Marathon, are listed here month by month, though I’d rather take the Great British Beer Fest in August over the Serpentine swim on Christmas Day. Brrrrrh – well, at least the latter is free, as is travel on Transport for London on new year’s eve so you can go and join the crowds watching the firework displays centred on the London Eye. There is also a brief mention on the practicalities and necessaries of health, insurance and the like.

Naturally, the bulk of the book is taken up with sections on each region of the City, beginning with Whitehall and Westminster, extending to Camden, Regent’s Park and Hampstead in the north, Brixton to Greenwich in the south-east, and Hammersmith to Hampton Court in the west. These include descriptions of the districts and a mention of places of interest, with seven pages alone on the National Gallery (a personal must-see-again for me each time I’m there if possible), and basic street maps. If you have the energy and the time and plan to do a certain amount on foot, a cheap and cheerful London A-Z for every street in detail would be a handy addition to this, but the Rough Guide maps are pretty good although they can’t include every single road. Where a particular area has an interesting historical association, a short essay on the relevant page will elaborate. For example, the section on Newgate to Smithfield will tell you all you need or want to know about the basis of public executions and body snatchers, and that on Bloomsbury includes a few paragraphs about the Bloomsbury Group of the early 20th century, centred around Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and others.

‘Listings’ includes accommodation, cafes and restaurants, pubs and bars, live music and clubs, theatre, lesbian and gay London, activities and sports, and also kids’ London – reminding us that many of the museums are not only free of charge but also child-friendly, as well as of entertainment to be had from the buskers and jugglers in Covent Garden, for example. Naturally, any information sources detailing restaurants and pubs are liable to date with changes of name, owner, possible closure, etc, and accommodation prices will probably have gone up within days of going to press, so a quick check online or a phone call might save disappointment. If you’re going there partly for the shopping, eleven pages will guide you around the largest and also the more unobtrusive retail outlets for anything from books and records (my favourites, you may not be surprised to learn) to food, drink and clothing, and give you a rundown of the main markets.

‘Contexts’ presents a 15-page history from prehistoric and Roman times to the present day. A book list, which includes not only histories, travel and volumes on art and architecture but also fiction based on or set in the City from Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens onwards, is a useful addition, as is the glossary of architectural terms and of British terms (off-licence for liquor store, bill for restaurant check, for instance), Cockney rhyming slang included. For the ones they don’t list, they even give you the website.

Finally, there is a comprehensive index, plus colour street maps of the centre, key bus routes, and the underground.

Overall

This book, at just over 600 pages, is compact enough to be taken away and used as a travel guide, but like other titles in the series it doubles well as a work of reference, to dip into at random. Moreover, unlike your average paperback (and I’m thinking of certain textbooks as well as novels), it is properly bound as well as printed on good quality paper, so you can open and close it several times without the pages working loose.

Whether you want to plan a week-long break, a boomerang 24-hour dash, or even just read about the hub of the country with the possibility of getting there one day – or alternatively you already live there and feel you ought to be getting more out of it than you already are – I think you’d be hard-pressed to find fault with it.