The Rough Guide to Britain (Rough Guide Travel Guides) [Paperback]

This hefty tome covers the whole of Britain, but does that provide enough detail on the country?

I had hoped to use the guide as more of my holidays are now in the UK, as with children it's a lot easier to avoid flights and all the hassle that goes with a holiday abroad.

However, was a bit disappointed in the lakes section. Had never been to the area before, and was relying on the book to guide me. Unfortunately it's very superficial for the area I was staying in. We ended up doing lots of great things that were recommended to us by other people, but didn't rate a mention (even if it was just a dot on the map!) in the book.

Having looked at the book in more detail after this holiday, my general feeling on it seems to be that it's excellent for cities - covers off city centres and must see attractions in all the major towns in the UK - which I would imagine is what any foreign visitor to the UK is most interested in. For areas outside the cities, it's a bit patchy, so if you're a Brit who wants to use it for stay at home holidays (refuse to use the hideous "staycation" term!), then you might might want to get something a bit more targeted at the area you're going to.

in summary, I'm giving it 4 stars as it does an admirable job of containing information about the whole of Britain - just be aware of its limitations before you buy.

This 1,005 guide to Britain is certainly crammed full of information. Unlike early Rough Guides it's printed on high-quality paper and is in full colour. It's not a book you're going to want to wander around with though. The paper is light weight but this is still a hefty book.

As a result of its geographical spread, and contextualisation of not just the development of Britain, but the constituent parts - England, Wales, and Scotland (the Isle of Man makes it in but the Channel Islands don't) - and with `practical' information as well, there's not a great deal of detail. The West Midlands and Peak District combined into one section, gets fewer than 40 pages in total for example. This forms one of 25 regional sections, together with the separate practical and contextual sections. I'm not sure that sufficient detail is provided for visitors visiting even specific regions or major cities.

So is the book more of a taster to potential tourists not familiar with GB deciding where to visit? In some ways yes, as Rough Guides publish separate guides for England, Wales, and Scotland, and regional guides as well - on Devon and Cornwall, London, the Cotswolds etc. Arguably the GB guide would be used to select places to visit, referring then to a more detailed, and portable regional or country guide. But then again, the British guide also includes detailed maps of town and city centres, although not a lot of text recommending particular sights to visit, or indeed places to eat in or stay at - the latter seems especially haphazard at best with typically a good hotel, midrange accommodation and a hostel typically listed for towns included. So, the guide will be of limited use to give any detail to a place visited, but at least it'll be possible for a reader to find their way around...

Overall I think the guide fails to serve any readership particularly well. It's not a general work introducing the history and culture of Britain, it offers only limited information on particular places, and if used as a sole guide to GB a rather limited view of the country would result. It also suffers from two fundamental problems with paper guide books. It's too heavy and bulky to carry about, and although published only a couple of months ago it's already out of date. For instance it outlines the services of the (soon to be late) airline bmi baby which closes in September 2012. I wonder, therefore, if a better medium for guide books is as an e-publication produced for a colour tablet or mobile phone. I suspect this is going beyond the major concerns of potential purchasers of this book however. My advice would be to buy a more detailed regional guide if you know where you wish to visit, if you don't this guide will give you lots of ideas, but you'll need to buy an additional detailed guide book as well, which might be one of the excellent Rough Guide regional publications.

Overall, three stars.

It is probably unfair of me to give this only three stars - a huge amount of work and research has gone into compiling a guide to the whole of Britain that comes in a reasonable sized book. An almost impossible task really as Britain has so much that could not possibly be condensed into one volume. For the average resident of our islands this might prove mildly unsatisfactory as there is so much that is inevitably not in this guide. however, for a tourist on a first visit or for someone who is taking a first look at an unfamiliar part of the UK, it serves as an excellent introduction to the possibilities and attractions and a fair idea of how much it would be possible to cover in a week or a day or two. It is a good introduction and has some very useful background stuff but it only skates the surface of any given area and any visitor would be wise to have a more detailed supplementary guide to accompany this. Nevertheless, it would be better than nothing and if you only wanted to take one book then you'd manage, just, with this guide.