Top 10 London: 2019

Eyewitness travel books have been a great source of information for me. I have about six of them and each has qualities that are helpful to a travel person wanting to see and understand the sites. The authors clearly have a keen sense of the destination being described. I recommend the books highly.

Useful guide. Easy to carry. Good info. Especially liked the tube map - easy to carry. Be careful to check that info is current as the book is not new.

Excellent source of information. Well organized book with maps for each section. Fold out maps on each cover with a pull-out in back are all very helpful. It came in especially handy while planning the trip but was also useful while there. Small enough to fit in your jacket or bag.

This is a great guide for several reasons. 1. It is small and can fit in your jacket pocket for quick reference. 2. It is well organized by neighborhood. 3. the recommendations are right on. 4.the maps are extremely useful. There are larger more detailed guidebooks out there. In fact I've used the standard eyewitness guidebook to London on a previous trip and it was great. This version is perfect for a returning visitor who wants some help navigating around London but has a basic familiarity with where things are.

Buying travel guides isn't exactly my thing - not suprising that it took me only minutes to get frustrated in the bookstore with the plethora of options available. For my purposes, I was looking for a book that would highlight must-see attractions, must-dine restaurants (I'm a food buff), must-walk streets, must-do road trips, etc. And critical that all this had to be presented in a easy to read manner, preferably as a simple bulletted list rather than paragraphs of information. But my biggest requirement was this: the guide had to be small enough (and light) to fit in my coat pocket, leaving my hands free as they should be.From all these angles and more, the Eyewitness Top 10 guide was the clear winner. Not only does the book provide top 10 attractions for the city as a whole, but it also mentions top 10 things to do within each attraction - e.g., you'll find top 10 things to do at the british museum, top 10 things to do at tate modern (with a list of must-see art works and where they're located within the museum), etc. Further, the book seems to recognize that people have different styles of exploring new cities because the organization of the book makes it really simple to plan your day according to a variety of themes: attractions, eateries and even neighborhoods - so you'll know what to do if you plan to spend an entire day around westminster & the south bank OR around covent gardens, for example. There is also a listing of the top 10 restaurants around each area which really came in handy. The book is full-color with detailed (yet to-the-point) maps, pictures, underground tube map, directions, etc. The book also contains quite a bit of trivia about each location, but the best part is the presentation - short & sweet and never overwhelming.The book contains a whole section on "Streetsmarts" which really helped me with the most basic of things - from understanding the foreign currency to making a phone call. Great section! I'm pretty sure I'll end up getting top 10 guides from this series for other european cities for future trips - they're easily the best travel guides I've found. And at less than 10 bucks a pop, can't imagine another guide that can even think of competing.