City Secrets London [With 2 Ribbon Bookmarks]

You will need time to make the purchase of this book worthwhile. London is gigantic. It's difficult enough to hit the very well documented high points. If you are making your first trip and/or have less than a week, stick to Eyewitness. If you are a repeat offender, disinterested in the main tourist attractions, or have a lot of time, you will not regret this purchase. This guide will get you off the beaten track and provide advice about how to avoid being trampled when you are on it.

LONDON, of the City Secrets series of travel guides, is a little gem that will easily fit into a pocket of your travel vest as you set out to explore what is arguably the world's greatest city. This volume, small in size but rich in information, divides Britain's capital into thirteen areas according to a scheme that escapes me. However, no matter. Each area, e.g. Hyde Park & Chelsea, The City, Oxford Street & Mayfair, or The East End & Beyond, is preceded by a map on which is marked each point of interest included in that section. And what you will find are both famous and little-known museums, historic buildings, art galleries, libraries, shops, pubs, churches, eateries, parks, squares, streets, memorials, and gardens. Each includes, at least, an address or location and the name of the nearest Underground or rail station. If relevant, there's also a phone number and/or the date the place was founded or constructed. The core of each listing is a short descriptive commentary by a contributing journalist, architect, philosopher, playwright, professor, author, historian, poet, curator, or some other professional of similar dignity. At the end of the book are an Index of Recommended Reading and an Index of Contributors. What you won't find are budget hotels, American fast-food franchises, newsagents, or 24-hour chemists (pharmacies) reviewed by backpacking college students, traveling salesmen, lorry drivers, or tourists from the Midwest. This is a genteel publication. LONDON is a delightful and uncommonly intelligent sightseeing resource for those of us who've been to the city often enough to have exhausted the usual tourist activities and are left with making silly faces at the Buckingham Palace guard to try and crack his reserve. And besides the information that might be considered usual for each of the listings, the contributors also provide tidbits of arcane information that the casual visitor would likely not know or learn, as in the following example.Regarding Oxford Street: "Plans drawn up in 1972 to transform Oxford Street into 'a tree-lined paradise' must have fallen down the back of somebody's sofa, because the busiest street in Britain can still ... make you lose the will to live - mainly at Christmas, when bright-eyed shoppers ... spill out of the ground at Oxford Circus and congeal in a fog of bus fumes and freshly roasted caramel nuts ... Nick Leonidas, blinded by yellow fever as a child, has busked here since 1981: five days a week, 52 weeks a year, 11am to 7pm with a half-hour break at three."LONDON in hand, I'm ready to return to my favorite city - now.

This new series is indeed a revelation: I bought "City Secrets London" after being most impressed with "Rome" and "Venice, Florence and Italian Cities", and London edition did not disappoint.In the world where simplification is all the rage, these little books seem like a welcome greeting from a bygone era. "No nonsense" books they are not: some people may call these guides unashamedly elitist. Most of the contributors seem so knowleadgeable that many readers may feel the whole content is too high-brow for them. I would be disappointed if this impression were to scare readers off. However, author's decision not to dumb down anything has to come at a cost, and if that cost is losing readers who expect a dumbed-down quick cheap-and-cheerful guide to London of Beefeaters and "Buckin'-Ham" Palace, so be it.Please do not mistake this for a proper guide which will give you general getting-around, hotels, eating-out and tourist highlight guidance. For this, you'll be better off with Eyewitness London. City Secrets is for people who basically know the city but want to find out little quirky things that other people miss (quite predictably and justifiably, because not everyone has time for in-depth look). City Secrets is all about the stuff that all really good human guides use: nuggets of information, crafty access to places, best-view routes and other things which make all the difference between an average guided tour and a really memorable experience.Contrary to what many casual travellers believe, London - although not blessed with relaxed Parisian charm or haunting and menacing spell of Florence - can be very cosy, friendly and pleasing to the eye and to the soul. If you think you like London and if you are likely to visit the city more than once in your life, you'll definitely need this book.

I've lived in London for 30 years and enjoy cycling around the place (an excellent way to get around, incidentally, but it would be irresponsible of me to recommend it to visitors), so I was intrigued by this book and pleasantly surprised at the selection, which contains most of my favourite places and pointed me in the direction of some I wasn't aware of. London is ideally suited to this kind of approach; there's a dislocation between tourist London, mostly centered around Westminster with maybe a trip downriver to St Pauls or the Tower, and the vast city where people live, most of which is unknown territory to tourists. Partly it's that old self-deprecatory British thing....why on earth would anyone want to come to this dump?....so all these marvellous places remain obscure and largely unloved. Take Hawksmoor's churches for instance. If they were in Paris or Rome they'd be set in squares lined with expensive cafes, with postcard stands dotted all over and coachloads of Japanese tourists milling around trying to get the best camera angle. As it's London they're stuck next to busy main roads, or buried away in the middle of nowhere - like St George's-in-the-East, mentioned in passing here, on a desolate stretch of main road somewhere on the way to Limehouse. Which actually suits them as there's something dark and lonely about them anyway, and they really couldn't be anywhere else but London. And that's somehow typical of the place...it's not often beautiful but it's endlessly fascinating. So let me do my bit for the London tourist trade and encourage y'all to come on over. Forget those silly guide books with pictures of beefeaters or the changing of the guard on the cover, and try this instead for a glimpse into a far more interesting and rewarding city.

"City Secrets London" is a fun read, compiled from writers, journalists, artists and architects take on what's the best of the London they know. Although I've got a house full of books on London and thought I knew most of the secrets, by reading if not by seeing, there were a lot of new things in this slim volume. The writing is so good, the sense of place so immediate, that it feels like a virtual tour of London, without a single photo. I highly recommend it.