Travel to Great Britain

Wallpaper City Guide: London (Wallpaper City Guide)

Format: Paperback
Author: Editors of Wallpaper Magazine
ReleaseDate: 15 September, 2006
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Rating:

Hip and slick "concept" but hardly functional
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. It's unclear for what audience this series of guidebooks is intended. 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.

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