Rick spends four months each year exploring Europe, and his candid, humorous advice will steer you to the very best sights and museums that London has to offer. You'll beat the lines at the major monuments. You'll find hotels and restaurants that make the most of your vacation budget. You'll navigate the city like a local, using Rick's walking tours as your guide.
One of the world's most captivating metropolises, London is a cultural colossus-renowned for its pulsating theater district, museums, monuments, and fabulous array of restaurants and bars. Your DK Eyewitness Top 10 travel guide ensures you'll find your way around London with absolute ease. Our annually updated Top 10 travel guide breaks down the best of London into helpful lists of ten-from our own selected highlights to the best museums and art galleries, places to eat, parks and gardens, and riverfront sights. You'll discover: • Thirteen easy-to-follow itineraries, perfect for a day trip, a weekend, or a week • Top 10 lists of London's must-sees, including detailed descriptions of the British Museum, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Science Museum, Buckingham Palace, London Eye, Tate Modernand Tate Britain, Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square, Tower of London, and St Paul's Cathedral • London's most interesting areas, with the best places for shopping, going out, and sightseeing • Inspiration for different things to enjoy during your trip-including festivals and cultural events, traditional pubs, hidden gems off the beaten track, and things to do for free • A laminated pull-out map of London and its environs, plus eleven full-color neighborhood maps • Streetsmart advice: get ready, get around, and stay safe • A lightweight format perfect for your pocket or bag when you're on the move Looking for more on London's culture, history, and attractions? Try our DK Eyewitness London.
A pocket-sized edition of the best-selling Great Pubs of London, this book celebrates London's most significant and historic pubs. For centuries, the pub has been an essential part of London's cultural and social fabric. This book takes readers through the doors of 25 historically and architecturally significant London pubs. Through photographs specially commissioned for this project, readers can explore these institutions--from snob screens to 400-hundred-year-old flagstone floors. Engaging texts highlight what makes each pub so special, their place in London's history, the personalities who have frequented them, the events that occurred inside, and the ways pubs have contributed phrases such as "on the wagon" and "one for the road" to the modern lexicon. This book reveals why the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden earned the nickname the "Bucket of Blood," and features a pub that Charles Dickens described as a "great rambling queer old place". Furthermore, the book muses over the chances that Casanova paid a visit to The Dog and Duck in Soho, and uncovers the location of Charles De Gaulle's favorite wartime watering hole. This fascinating book is a must-have for anyone with a love for these London institutions and its new, easy-to-carry format makes it perfect for taking on a historic pub crawl.
642 Things to Draw is a guided journal that will inspire creativity, energize the mind, and stimulate artistry in any aspiring or skilled creator. Dive into this treasure trove of offbeat, clever, and endlessly absorbing drawing prompts. This guided art journal includes 642 random drawing prompts: A rolling pin, a robot, a pickle, a water tower, a hammock, a wasp, a safety pin, a kiss. Some are deceptively simple (just try drawing a bicycle!), some are conceptually mind-bending (sketching the sound of girlish laughter?), and some are refreshingly basic (the only hard thing about drawing an egg is deciding how you want it to be cooked). Hip and helpful, 642 Things to Draw is the perfect inspirational sketchbook, sure to entertain and provoke the imagination of anyone ready to pick up a pencil. FUN FOR ANYONE: Budding artists and experienced sketchers alike will find themselves invigorated by this collection of unique and wonderful drawing prompts. While there are no step-by-step, how-to-draw instructions included, you don't have to be a skilled artist to enjoy the relaxing, stimulating, and engaging drawing ideas. SPARK CREATIVITY: Designed to spur casual doodling while entertaining the mind, this collection of 642 silly, thought-provoking, simple, and complex prompts will push your mind--and pencil--to think outside the box. USERS LOVE IT: With hundreds of 5-star ratings, reviewers rave about this book, calling it "great for all ages" and "the best drawing book you'll ever pick up." Perfect for: Birthday, holiday, or graduation gifts for artists of all ages seeking to expand their knowledge or boost creative awareness Anyone who could benefit from an occasional creative brain break that is pure enjoyment Doodlers, sketchbook lovers, and fans of adult coloring books or inspirational journals
From the sacred stones of Westminster Abbey to the top of the London Eye, the city is yours to discover with Rick Steves! Inside Rick Steves London 2020 you'll find: Comprehensive coverage for spending a week or more exploring London Rick's strategic advice on how to get the most out of your time and money, with rankings of his must-see favorites Top sights and hidden gems, from Trafalgar Square and the Tower of London to where to find the best tikka masala or fish and chips Connect with local culture: Catch a show in Soho, take afternoon tea, or have a pint of English ale with Londoners in a pub Beat the crowds, skip the lines, and avoid tourist traps with Rick's candid, humorous insight The best places to eat, sleep, and relax with a Pimm's Cup Self-guided walking tours of lively neighborhoods and world-class museums like the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Day trips to Windsor, Cambridge, and Stonehenge Detailed neighborhood maps and a fold-out city map for exploring on the go Useful resources including a packing list, popular British slang, a historical overview, and recommended reading Over 600 bible-thin pages include everything worth seeing without weighing you down Make the most of every day and every dollar with Rick Steves London 2020. Spending just a few days in the city? Try Rick Steves Pocket London.
London, more than any other city, has a secret history concealed from view. Behind the official façade promoted by the heritage industry lies a city of esoteric traditions, obscure institutions, and forgotten locations. Occult London rediscovers this history, unearthing the hidden city that lies beneath our own. From the Elizabethan magic of Dr Dee and Simon Forman to the occult designs of Wren and Hawksmoor; from the Victorian London of Spring-Heeled Jack to the fin de siecle heyday of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley. This book describes these practitioners of the occult and their unorthodox beliefs, alongside the myths and legends through which the city has always been perceived. The role of the occult within London's literary history is also outlined, while a gazetteer maps the sites of London's most resonant occult locations. Today we are experiencing a renewal of interest in the occult tradition, and Merlin Coverley examines the roots of this revival, exploring the rise of New Age philosophies and the emergence of psychogeography in shaping a new vision of the city
What do writers such as Charles Dickens and Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair and Robert Louis Stevenson have in common? The answer lies in the use these authors make of London as a fictional setting. Yet in these works and in those of other London writers the city is much more than merely a backdrop, instead becoming a character in its own right and creating a sense of place that is both a reflection and a reworking of the city. Here London is presented as a living organism, a huge and mysterious labyrinth, and the source of endless imagination. A whole world is contained by the city and within it the entire spectrum of human experience. From Bleak House to Hawksmoor, from Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, London has continued to generate a series of fantastic visions. The humorous and the tragic, the grotesque and the bizarre, everything is possible here.In this book, Merlin Coverley examines the major themes in the development of the London novel from its origins in the Victorian metropolis and onward to the present day and the revival of London writing. On the way he explores the Occult Tradition and London Noir, the Disaster Novel and the rise of Psychogeography, and alongside the recognised classics of the genre he recovers some of those lost London writers whose works have been unjustly neglected.
London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who sought to capture the essence of the place. Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare’s day to the present. These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown. Here are dramatic views of such iconic events as the plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz, but also William Thackeray’s account of going to see a man hanged, Thomas De Quincey’s friendship with a teenaged prostitute, and Doris Lessing’s defense of the Underground. This literary London encompasses the famous Baker Street residence of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the bombed-out moonscape of Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime streets, Charles Dicken’s treacherous River Thames and Frederick Treves’s tragic Elephant Man. Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Hanif Kureishi are among the many great writers who give us their varied Londons here, revealing a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy.
