Tim Locke writes about his own book:

This is a new series (now repackaged as Mini Guides, but essentially the same as Leisure Guides), far removed from the previous AA Leisure series, with a more compact format, and aimed at covering fewer places but in more detail. It’s a personal selection of the best the area has to offer, with places not usually covered by guides (such as the houseboats at Shoreham) and some different slants on places like Brighton and the Long Man of Wilmington – the enigmatic chalk hill figure that now turns out not to be nearly as old as many had supposed.

There are pubs and tearooms, but not restaurants or accommodation. Plus walks and cycle rides taken from a companion AA volume for which I contributed the cycle rides.

It was a lot of fun researching this one with my wife Anne, in the area I live, and with enough time to see everything in agreeable leisure (not a concept that normally goes with writing guidebooks) throughout the balmy summer days when we often ended up the day cooling off with a swim from a beach somewhere.

The format generally works well – boxes for ancillary snippets and factoids, other places to visit, and sporty things to do like where to learn paragliding in the South Downs.

The design is bright and fun, with colour photos, but the text is not over-compromised by the design. Generally the author has room to say quite a bit about a place and to be opinionated – which is all good news.
 

Buy from Amazon. Mini Guide version from Amazon.