Are you new to the area or have you just arrived in the U.K. and are trying to get you bearings? If so, we can recommend Ordnance Survey Landranger Maps as each one covers a reasonably sized area with a good degree of detail. You will be able to see your particular location, along with road networks, railways & stations and almost endless features, ranging from Post Offices, public houses and historic sites, to public rights of way (footpaths & bridleways) through some outstanding scenery; you can even see the predominant type of trees in woodlands! You can preview at http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/ but the traditional paper versions are much more visually attractive and walkers, in particular, can often be seen carry them. There is also the Explorer series but as the scale is much larger, the area covered by each one is much less than that offered by the smaller scale Landrangers. Each map retails at around £7.50 and they can make for both an interesting and useful souvenir of time spent in the area. We even know someone who likes to receive one as a birthday present as “they make a good read” although we aren’t going to advocate that you become this fixated!

OS Landranger 175 (ISBN 0-319-22775-8) covers the area from Reading to Slough and High Wycombe to Camberley (including Maidenhead & Windsor).

We think that this book does live up to its title – so many of this type of read are either quite mundane, inaccurate or both but the elements of Watching the English that we have read really do ring true. This publication is of the type into which you can ‘dip’ – you can flick open a random page and read a paragraph without needing to worry about not having read those that precede it. Indeed, reading the whole book from cover to cover appears quite daunting, this probably being why we haven’t done it. There are sections upon conversation and behaviour codes, humour and food rules and plenty more but the writing style is relaxed and informal, making for a lighter read that can be picked up and put down at leisure, for five minutes at a time or fifty. As a foreigner, you may well discover that Watching the English will unravel at least some of the mysteries of English attitudes and behaviour; as a native, you will probably find yourself agreeing with many of the observations therein. Whether you have just arrived in the U.K., have been living here for years or are English through and through, this book could well be for you.

RRP £8.99, ISBN 978-0-340-81886-2.