Getmapping.com came up with a beautifully simple idea in 1998: photograph the whole of the UK from the air to create a kind of modern Doomsday Book. Then they and HarperCollins realised that the London part of the survey would give a unique view of one of the world"s most famous cities, and so this book was born. It really is unbelievably simple, and of interest to any lover of London who also enjoys maps and photographs. Getmapping.com flew a plane at 5,500 feet taking photos automatically, then digitised the photos so they could be colour-corrected and adjusted to allow for variations in light, weather, contours and the plane"s flight. The result is a homogenous set of photographs of the whole city, with a conventional street atlas stuck on the back. Every street in London is indexed to both the photographic and the cartographic atlas, so you should be able to find any place you want quickly and easily.A word about the scale of the photos, particularly about what the potential reader can expect to see clearly: in order to make the size of the book manageable, the scale increases as you move out from the centre. There are 74 pages of central London (Regent"s Park to the South Bank, and Earls Court to Whitechapel) at 1:3000, 112 of inner London (Richmond to the Isle of Dogs, Highgate to Dulwich) at 1:6000, 96 of outer London at 1:12000, and 40 pages of cartography covering the whole of London at 1: 24000. In central London the roofs of individual houses can be picked out easily; in inner London they are still discernible, though not so clearly; by the time you get to outer London it"s more a question of finding a street. --David Pickering