This website aims to be a comprehensive, unbiased guide to London. We have nothing to sell and therefore we're not afraid to criticise where we think it's due. We're constantly offered advertising deals or endorsement deals and turn 99% of them down because we think the product is crap. When we praise something it's because we think it's worth it, not because we're carrying its adverts. We're not the 'official' tourist board - an organisation which aims to direct tourists to money-making ventures, and raise money for Britain's tourist industry. If you want to visit the canon of iconic tourist traps (Mme Tussauds, The Tower, Buckingham Palace, The London Dungeon) they'll be able to help you, and sell you a ticket. They won't tell you if it's worth the trip, which is where we come in.

The website started out, as most things do, at a dinner party in 1997. We found we were all equally appalled with the information available on the internet and its inherent bias. We'd all received bad advice from someone who was laughing all the way to the bank. And we all lived in, and loved London. So a group of friends set out to write an online guidebook under the editorship of Simon Crutchley, who edits for a living and knows about that sort of thing.

Our original contributors were a wide and varied bunch of Brits and Americans, generally most of whom were hanging about Oxford in the 80s. Some of the contributors have gone back to the States, many are now too busy with jobs and families to keep it up, and the site is now maintained almost single-handedly by Simon. Pages are updated in rotation throughout the year. We can answer some simple queries, and point you in the right direction if we don't know the specifics - we do get a lot of emails but generally hope to answer them within three days. Some of the advice on various pages may vary slightly and represents the original contributors' opinions, we've chosen to keep this in as an effort at pluralism, rather than go for bland conformity.