London Eyewitness Travel Guide - Explore Top Attractions, Maps & Insider Tips | Perfect for Tourists & Travel Enthusiasts

The new (2006) Eyewitness Guide for London maintains the beautifully-photographed, competently-written, and *brilliantly designed* full-color format--with heavy use of informational sidebars--that the DK Eyewitness series has become famous for. It's a combination of a guide for practical use and--primarily--a whirlwind, photographically-intensive overview of London as a tourist is likely to encounter it...and as a tourist is likely to enjoy remembering it when looking through the book upon return from London.The book is nicely arranged by sections of the city. All major tourist attractions are covered, in part through the use of attractive cutaway museum floor plans and street plans for neighborhoods commonly visited by tourists, including a few removed from the center of London, such as Greenwich.The Eyewitness Guides do not provide in-depth or specialist information; but, overall, they are no less detail-oriented than any other of the many *basic overview* guidebooks. A helpful contrasting example might be the Blue Guide for London: which is also an overview guide book but which cannot fairly be called a "basic" guide. While the Blue Guide is as broad in scope as the Eyewitness Guide in terms of the number of attractions covered, it is generally more detail-oriented, especially regarding architecture and history.Since the Eyewitness Guide for London is not a specialist guide book, it is also largely free from editorializing, for better or worse. (I.e., no entry in an Eyewitness guide is going to include a suggestion to avoid a particular attraction, or a warning that some aspect of an attraction can prove frustrating. Other guides--such as a TimeOut, Blue Guide, or a Lonely Planet guide--are better for that.)As is the case with most guide books, the Eyewitness Guide also offers sections of practical tips and information. This includes how to operate most London phones, what British currency looks like, what the emergency numbers are (e.g., in London one dials "999" not "911"), where to buy stamps, how "zebra" crosswalks work, etc. It should be stressed that other guide books offer the same information, and some more comprehensively. But the Eyewitness series' handling of such information is noteworthy once again because of the photographically-intensive style. While another guide book might inform the reader that in London phone booths are red, the Eyewitness Guide states the same thing *and shows a photograph* of a typical red phone booth. Is such a photograph really necessary? No. But, the photograph becomes one more aspect of the London tourist experience graphically captured by the publisher.In short, the book is a must-have if you're traveling for the first time to London. I never tire of thumbing through my Eyewitness Guide for London. So rich, colorful, and dense are the layers of photographic and graphic elements in the Eyewitness Guide for London that it can provide hours of enjoyment both before and after your trip.