DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Duncan Petersen Author & Editor

Duncan Petersen travel guides are the icing on the cake:  enjoyable, and necessary…  the key to experiences you would otherwise never enjoy. And we present those experiences in imaginative, often unique formats. Our flagship series, the Charming Small Hotel Guides, reveal places to stay that are more than just a bed for the night – they are an experience for which you’d travel miles out of your way. No hotel pays for an entry, so you get an honest, balanced review – no compliments for cash. We also publish On Foot Guides which are our city walks guide series. It’s the only series to show walks on beautiful bird’s-eye mapping, showing the buildings as well as the street plan. So you experience the city as it really looks, and in depth. Our In a Box walks series is also innovative: the walks are on cards packed in a box. Take one out, put it in the plastic sleeve and off you go – each card has full directions, a map plus things to see along the way. The lightest possible walking guide, much more convenient than a book or a hand-held device. In addition to all this, we also The Craft Gin Guide, the key to enjoying the tide of new small batch gins and their distilleries; and The Micropub Guide, featuring the new wave of pubs that specialize in cask-conditioned real ale. Duncan Petersen usually acts as the ‘author’ of its own guides, helped by a team of contributors outside and inside the office. Perhaps our best-known contributor is hotel critic and travel writer Fiona Duncan, wife of the publisher Andrew Duncan and general editor of the Charming Small Hotel Guides series.