Matt Brown

A stylish collection of beautifully designed maps of each individual London borough, paired with quirky and fascinating facts about what you'll find there. Cartographer and illustrator Mike Hall is renowned for his retro-themed print collection of boldly coloured, highly detailed maps of every London borough, inspired by classic 1960s graphic design. Published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the boroughs' establishment, The Boroughs of London brings together all of Mike's London maps in one elegant volume to pore over. But that's not all: alongside the maps is a wealth of authoritative but chatty commentary on each borough from Matt Brown, author of many Batsford books and acknowledged London expert. Packed with interesting facts, anecdotes and trivia, the book provides an introduction to each borough and its constituent neighbourhoods, as well as coverage of ten key places of interest per borough, including historic buildings, monuments, squares, parks and street markets, accompanied by quirky illustrations. It all adds up to a fascinating snapshot of the borough's rich history and present-day diversity and culture. From well-known, much-visited central London boroughs like Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to less famous, further-flung suburban areas such as Bexley and Hillingdon, this book provides endless revelations about one of the greatest cities of the world, borough by borough. It's the perfect book for London-dwellers, London visitors and London obsessives, history fans, cartophiles and graphic design aficionados. Readers will want to visit every borough!

A highly entertaining read for anyone with even a passing interest in art and art history. This myth-busting book takes you on a great ride through the lives of starving (and not so starving) artists, unusual exhibitions and painting blunders throughout history. In the intriguing, outrageous and often provoking world of the visual arts, nothing is quite as it seems. From the world's first intance of photobombing in 1843 to the Damien Hirst spot painting that landed on Mars, the destruction of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers during World War II and the GBP3,500 sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, Everything You Know About Art is Wrong will confound your assumptions about the world of art - and perhaps even the place of art in the world.