A-Z London: London's Best Selling Street Atlas

Rating:
Summary: A-Z all you need to know about London streets
Review: buy this one if you want to get your bearings ahead of time, otherwise, you can buy a mini-version of this book in most stores around London (e.g. Tesco, Marks & Spencers, tourist shops).You can explore anywhere in London with confidence. A-Z lists streets, attractions, tube locations, etc... every Londoner has one.

Rating:
Summary: I say, can you direct me to Bleeding Heart Yard?
Review: I'm a map junkie, especially national highway and city street maps. Perhaps it's the lure of the open road and exotic places. In any case, I recently acquired the LONDON A-Z street atlas, and I'm in seventh heaven. London, you see, is my favorite city in the whole world.

The atlas covers the city center plus outlying suburbs from Romford and Sidcup in the east to Ruislip and Shepperton in the west, and Barnet and Enfield in the north to Sutton and Croyden in the south. Claiming to index over 69,000 streets, each of its 170 color map pages is, well, busy. Since the atlas is only 7.5 by 5 inches, the street names are printed small and require either the good vision of youth or the spectacles of old age. And a magnifying glass helps.

There are several other useful features: a single page map each for the West End cinemas and theatres, a map-referenced listing of hospitals and hospices, a map-referenced listing of all rail, Tramlink and Underground stations, a schematic of Greater London's rail connecting points with the Underground, and the world famous color schematic of the latter. This is good stuff.

Of course, there are symbols on each map for the usual clutter of police stations, post offices, information centers, fire stations, churches and chapels, shopping centres and markets, public buildings, toilets for the disabled, tracks and footpaths, etc.

My only complaint concerns those maps other than the large-scale ones of Central London. On the former, the rail and Underground stations, those beacons of solidity in an uncertain world, aren't as immediately obvious as one might like. They're much better indicated on the Central London plans.

Oh, and Bleeding Heart Yard? Why, it's right there on page 161 in map square 6K. Can't miss it, guv.

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable
Review: This is exactly what its title implies--a street atlas of Greater London. As others have said, don't buy it if you want anything else. (I wonder why people would buy an atlas expecting a guidebook!) The A-Z was invaluable to me when I was living in London; I took it everywhere I went. It's compact but incredibly detailed, and really is essential in finding your way around the city. As the description says, the streets of London do not follow a discernable pattern, and names are often repeated; without this book you may very well find yourself in South Wimbledon (Abbey Road SW19) while looking for the famous crossing (Abbey Road NW8)--or, more likely, and worse, vice versa.