- Respected publisher
- Unbiased recommendations
- Needs to be better organized - just can't find what you need
- Lack of budget options
- Aimed at visitors and Londoners:
- I can't see many Londoners buying it but the dedicated Lonely Planet following will add it to their collection.
- Maps are basic and not detailed enough so I would recommend the London A-Z if you really want to find your way around.
- Major omission of no information (I could find) on using London buses.
- Some nice color photos but they are grouped together on a few pages to save on color printing costs.
- Only a few black and white photos throughout the book but most seem to be taken with a distracting, skewed perspective.
- Like DK Eyewitness Travel London this guidebook has no adverts.
- Lonely Planet web site
Lonely Planet is the 'bible' of backpackers so it's a shame Lonely Planet London has a lack of budget accommodation to recommend. They have included plenty of up-market places but these will be out of reach for most of their readers. The same has happened with their restaurant listings which again scrimps on the 'cheap eats' but has plenty of the big name places. It's not that what they have included is bad, it's just there's not enough of what's needed for the target audience.
Lonely Planet have an extensive range of guide books to worldwide destinations and it may be for consistency across the City Guides that they have the Neighbourhoods section. This division may work well for US cities but do you know which neighbourhood Buckingham Palace is in? Exactly. All the attractions are listed within their 'neighbourhood' so I found myself turning to the Index a lot. And I didn't like the Eating/Drinking/Shopping/Sleeping Index being just after the main index so I had to keep flicking past it. This book does need to be organized in a different way as the information is useful, it's just hard to access. More cross-referencing would certainly help.
The attractions descriptions lack the detail (or the visuals) of DK Eyewitness Travel London. And a constant problem for books is that they can't stay up-to-date with the changing ticket prices, opening times, etc. of places in London. Always check for the latest information and don't trust everything you read.
Once I had read the whole book I understood more of the comments in brackets throughout the text but that won't help if you plan to use the book to dip into, as you would expect to with a travel guide. It would be best to buy Lonely Planet London before you get to London as there's lots of information to read and help you plan your time here - and that'll give you time to find it all.
