Travel guides strike me as a perfect type of application for the iPhone. A good guide to a city you’re going to visit for work or pleasure can be a huge timesaver, and if it’s thorough and well done, it just may save you carrying around various road maps, city guides, and assorted other printed materials.
The London Travel Guide – developed by Coolgorilla – sets out to be this sort of useful companion for anyone who is visiting (or maybe even moving to) London.
I lived in London for more than 10 years and absolutely love it. It’s a city that’s so large, so diverse, so vibrant, that whatever your interests and likes, you’ll find lots to do there. So I was very keen to see whether The London Travel Guide does it justice …
The guide contains some 400 pages and offers a pretty comprehensive overview of London. Its pages are nicely optimized for the iPhone, and it’s well structured, making it easy to find what you’re after quickly. Here’s a little run-through of its main sections:
Introduction:
This first section offers a how to on using the guide itself, a brief introduction to London and some history of the city dating back to 43 AD, facts and figures on things like London’s population of some 7.5 million people and the 300 languages and dialects spoken in London, as well as weather facts and average monthly temperatures.
It’s even got a section on the English language, with some good examples of cockney rhyming slang: so for example you learn that ‘Me old china’ means ‘My old friend’ – because mate is the most common word for friend, and ‘china plate’ is rhyming slang for mate.
Finally, there’s a Useful Numbers section that gives you phone numbers for emergency services, London Transport, airports, and more.
Getting Around:
This section provides a good overview of the London Underground and buses (including info on the only old school double deckers still in service, which are well worth a ride), railways, taxis, river transport. There are also sections on driving (including great advice for driving in Central London – don’t); as well as information on Bus Tours, River Tours, taxi tours, and some excellent walking tours to help you discover the city on foot. And London is a great city to walk around in.
Events:
The Events section gives you a month by month guide to events around London. The month of March, for instance, will feature The Boat Race – the Oxford vs. Cambridge rowing event that draws around 250,000 spectators each year, and is the basis for a great day out by the river for lots of locals and tourists alike.
Attractions:
The Attractions section runs down some of the best and most famous things to see in London – from Abbey Road where The Beatles, Pink Fl
oyd, Radiohead, and many others have recorded some of the most famous albums ever, to Westminster Abbey, the magnificent site where much of the British royal family has been christened, married, and buried. It is also where such notable figures as Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, Churchill, and many other famous figures are buried or commemorated. When my wife visited London for the first time with me, Westminster Abbey was the one famous place we went to twice, she loved it so much.
Each attraction listing page has a handy Google map section showing where it is (and you can jump straight out to the Maps app from these if you want) and phone numbers etc.
Some of the attractions and famous places have video as well as photgraphs to show them off. The short videos offer aerial views and a sneak peek at any you’re considering getting to during a London visit.
Entertainment:
In this section you’ll find information on theater, bars, cinema, dance, live music, casinos, spectator sports, and even Traditional London Pubs, with some good recommendations on a few historic and interesting ones. Pubs – and great beer – are one of the things I miss most about London 🙁
Restaurants & Accomodation:
These are two separate sections – but they are each laid out the same way, offering a rundown of some of the leading and notable spots to stay and to eat out, divided up helpfully by price range brackets.
Shopping:
The Shopping section runs down all the great shopping districts in London – like Regent Street, Kings Road, Carnaby Street, Oxford Street, and some of the city’s popular markets.
Conclusions
The London Travel Guide is a very good iPhone web resource, with an excellent range of information to cover just about all your needs if visiting the city. Its pages load at an OK speed even on an Edge connection, which is very helpful for this sort of site.
My only small gripes would be that it would have been nice to have some audio, a spoken walk-through, on the video clips of popular sites to visit, and I also would like to see more generous helpings of pictures throughout the site. There are some quite good ones, but they are relatively sparse in my opinion. London’s got a huge array of great places to see and photograph – so it would be good to have images attached to nearly all the pages in the Attractions section for example.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the London Travel Guide. if you’re planning a visit to London, this looks like a superb companion for helping you get the most out of a trip. I love the famous Samuel Johnson quote that says if a man is bored of London, he is bored of life. This guide will help you to discover why that quote is so true, and keep you a million miles away from bored while visiting this great city.
Check out the London Travel Guide at:
http://www.londontravelguide.com/iphone
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