Product Description

"The Navigator"[registered] sets the standard among British road atlases its ultra-large scale maps contain unrivalled detail and clearly show every road down to even the smallest country lane and track. This new, fully updated edition features 315 pages of road mapping plus, 56 fully indexed town plans; the London Congestion Charge Zone; detailed maps of Britain's major ferry ports and airports; shopping villages; canal bridge numbers; camping and caravan sites, and much much more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #307716 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"'The reigning champion of road atlases' THE SUNDAY TIMES "The ultimate road atlas' BEST BUY, AUTO EXPRESS"

Auto Express
The ultimate road atlas.

Classic and Sports Car
Best product.

Customer Reviews

Four-and-a-half - it's almost perfect
UPDATED REVIEW - This edition has been superceded (Feb 2007). See under "Philip's Navigator Britain"

This is the latest, 2005, edition of Philips' behemoth of a road atlas (the cover is identical, except for the map extract of Chepstow, to the last (2003) edition and its 2004 revision - be careful if you're tempted to buy it in your high street bookshop!).

It is undisputedly the clearest and most detailed single-volume road atlas of Great Britain. Amazon's synopsis above is spot on - the only way to get greater detail is to buy all 204 Ordnance Survey 1-inch maps - and it is a great tool for planning journeys or days out, and for checking alternative routes to avoid traffic jams. There is an exhaustive index of place names, and since even most unclassified roads are shown there's no excuse for getting lost.

Regular buyers of the atlas may initially be slightly unnerved by the fact that they have swopped round the colours of the roads - trunk A roads are now in green, normal A roads in red (they both used to be yellow) and B roads now in yellow (they used to be brown). You will get used to it though.

The main thing against it is its large size, 11 inches by 15, and over 380 pages, which makes it rather unwieldy even for your passenger to use in the car as you're going along. And although there are 50-odd city centre plans, this is not as many as in some atlases provide. In particular, larger scale coverage of outer-London and the other main conurbations would have been useful, because, even at 1 inch to 1.5 miles, it is difficult to plot your way through these.

Even so this is a great road atlas, and once you have sampled it all others pale by comparison.

UPDATE:- This edition has been superceded (Feb 2007) - See under "Philip's Navigator Britain"

Review of Philip's Navigator Road Atlas of Britain
This Atlas maps England and Southern Scotland at a scale of 1:100,000 or approximately one and a half miles to one inch and since the demise of the John Bartholomew 1:100.000 colour contoured maps, fills an important gap between the small scale road maps and atlases at 3 to 4 miles to 1 inch and the OS 1:50,000 maps. These maps are extreamely clear and detailed, and are ideal for navigating smaller roads by car or bicycle, while being compact enough to encompass longer journeys also. My only suprise is that George Philip's can afford to keep the database going as many of the smaller scale road atlases by the RAC and the AA are much more aggressively marketed and discounted. There must be 100 people wo purchase a '3 mile to 1 inch' or so-called 'Superscale' atlas for every Navigator Atlas sold, yet this Atlas will need three times the work to maintain.

The maps are available in several formats. As well as the single volume of Britain, more regional atlases are being released which offer the maps at identical scale in a more handy format, as well as fold out maps of various counties.

I have only two criticisms of the series. One is that the 1:100,000 coverage only extends as far as Southern Scotland, after which they are replaced by 1:200,000 maps. People will not want to carry around such a large and bulky volume for 1:200,000 maps when they can use much smaller atlases for this sort of scale? It would have been better to offer a consistant scale, ommit Scotland altogether or publish the Scottish maps in a separate volume. One could argue that as the maps do not show hill releaf, and are primarily road maps, that Central and Northern Scotland does not require such detailed mapping. My second gripe is that it would have been better to offer the single volume atlas as a hardback Library Edition for use in the home and market the regional spiral bound volumes for car use. As it stands, the single volume Edition is rather too bulky for ease of use in the car and would certainly be too big for use on a bike. It is also too bulky to be published as a paperback book and would handle better as a hardback.

Dispite the above points, I would recommend the Navigator maps to anyone for home or travelling, and hope that Philip's will soon complete the release of the regional atlases and folded maps for the whole country.

Still the best.
This will be my second Phillips Navigator as their is nothing on the market to compare with it,and at £10+pp is exeptional good value.It even gives names of farms that would otherwise be hard to find.Recommended.