Why London needs a local guide
London is too big for one guide, but that's exactly why it needs one. Every borough is a different city. Peckham is not Shoreditch. Shoreditch is not what it was in 2015. Brixton Market on a Saturday is an education in West Indian, West African, and South American food that no restaurant review covers properly. The good stuff is hyper-local.
London receives over 30 million international visitors a year, and an overwhelming majority follow a track between Westminster, the South Bank, and Oxford Street. They leave having never taken the Overground to Peckham Rye, never walked through Ridley Road Market in Dalston on a Friday afternoon, never eaten jerk chicken from a spot on Coldharbour Lane that has had the same smoker running since the 1990s. To become a tour guide in London means picking your corner and knowing it cold. You cannot guide all of London. Nobody can. But you can guide Brixton, or Hackney, or Bermondsey, or Deptford, and do it better than any app ever will. The city adds roughly 20 new restaurants every week. Turkish ocakbasi on Stoke Newington Road, Nigerian suya in Peckham, Sichuan hot pot in the back streets off Shaftesbury Avenue — the food alone justifies a guide who actually eats out. Become a tour guide in London and you fill a gap that no guidebook has ever closed. The city is too fast, too layered, too local for print. Become a tour guide in London and you become the one person who actually knows what is open, what is good, and what moved to a different postcode last month.