Wallpaper City Guide: London (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)) [Paperback]

Editors of Wallpaper Magazine (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press) | Publication Date: September 15, 2006

"Wallpaper City Guides" not only suggest where to stay, eat, and drink, but what the tourist passionate about design might want to see, whether he/she has a week or 24 hours in the city. Featured are up and coming areas, landmark buildings in an 'Architour', design centres, and the best shops to buy items unique to that city. "Wallpaper City Guides" present travellers with a fast-track ticket to the chosen location. The edited guides offer the best, most exciting, and the most beautiful of that particular city. As well as looking beautiful, the guides are expertly designed with function as a priority, and have tabbed sections so that the tourist can easily find what they are looking for. There are maps, rate and currency cards, colour-coded parts of the city, and an easy navigational tool. They are the ultimate combination of form and function.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'The answer to every short-breaker's dream. Small, perfectly formed - they fit into pockets of jeans or jackets - they contain almost everything one needs to know...The jewel-coloured guides look beautiful and are exquisitely designed. Even a geographically challenged dolt like me stands a chance of finding my way around Shanghai with the simple map at the back of the book.'

About the Author

Wallpaper* City Guides are compiled by the magazine's travel experts, both by in-house editors, and correspondents who actually live in the highlighted cities, providing up-to-the-minute information

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Phaidon Press (September 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0714846872
• ISBN-13: 978-0714846873
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 4.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,538,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hip and slick "concept" but hardly functional, January 10, 2007

By 

World Traveler (Washington, DC, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wallpaper City Guide: London (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)) (Paperback)

It's unclear for what audience this series of guidebooks is intended. The first-time visitor will find them totally bewildering, while the seasoned traveler will inevitably quibble with the extremely quirky choice of locations included, none of which is marked on the rudimentary map on the inside back flyleaf. The 100 tiny pages, presumably intended to fit into a trouser pocket or small purse, are largely devoted to photographs (attractive), but which reduce still further the space for actual travel information. Wallpaper would have done much better to have merely collected in one place all the great restaurants, hotels, shops, and services featured monthly in the pages of their magazine. Instead, only four shops are featured for a city as huge and varied as London! The idea of reserving only one page for an alleged "insider" profile (once again with minimal "tips," none of them marked on a map) is an interesting "concept" but nearly useless to any traveler. It would appear that Wallpaper's aim was to present each city as a "concept" rather than a series of useful, practical pieces of information (why then an entire section on "escaping" from the city, when you've hardly even discovered it?), but in the end it's mostly an interesting conceit that will appeal to devotees who don't really need another guidebook at all. I religiously clip the tear-out travel pages in the monthly magazine; the recent page for London contains far more useful information for the traveler than this entire book (and has a useful map besides). Wallpaper the magazine is a terrific treasure-trove of cutting-edge information for the on-the-go, in-the-know citizen of the world. In reducing the format and the content, however, both the excitement and the utility have been pared away as well. What could have been a stunning series is instead little more than a curiosity.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Yes, cool, and so what?, June 7, 2007

By 

Stephen Quinn "Steve" (Providence, RI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wallpaper City Guide: London (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)) (Paperback)

So if you're like me and you've traveled a bit, you know that pretty much all maps in ALL guidebooks are less than totally useful. If you want a comprehensive map, ESPECIALLY for a place like London, get an A-Z. I like this guide because I like opinionated suggestions about places to go during my limited free time when I'm traveling on business. Are all of these suggestions great? No. Can I afford to stay at all the hotels? Again, no. But these guides give really interesting ideas, food for thought, and a couple of places that made colleagues say "How did you hear about THIS place?". And for $8.95, that's more than worth it to me.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too Cool, March 26, 2007

By 

smy (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wallpaper City Guide: London (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)) (Paperback)

I was really excited when I picked up this guidebook for my recent trip to London. I'm a seasoned traveller but hadn't been to London in almost twenty years and I was looking for a happening, locals' list of places. Pretty quickly I realized that not only is the book very limited, it's also focused primarily on the more expensive end of an already incredibly expensive city. It's definitely the 'swanky' guide to London. Best sections were landmarks and architecture -- stuff that generally isn't covered in other books.