Expert Travel Advice – Stanfords Blog

Books Full of 2025 Travel Inspiration

If you are making plans for 2025 and want some travel inspiration, these books are jam packed with places to go at the right times of year so you can book a dream trip and not miss a thing.

Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2025

£14.99

Want to know more about the emerging travel hotspots and best value destinations for 2025? You’ve come to the right place. Lonely Planet’s expert panel of self-confessed travel geeks have joined forces once again to present a year’s worth of exciting must-visit places and out-of-this-world experiences. This annual guide ranks the world’s hottest countries, regions, and cities. Featuring a top 10 lists plus NEW top 10 categories, amazing photography and insider tips, you’ll find mountains of inspiration to take you from the ordinary to the unforgettable.

The Intrepid list: 100 Uncommon Experiences to Change the Way You Travel

£22.99

The Intrepid List is the very first travel guidebook from world-renowned experts in adventure, Intrepid Travel. But this isn’t a bucket list book – this is for the explorers, the thrillseekers, the festivalgoers and foodies who want to get under the skin of a place; to discover local secrets and experience the eccentric, the rare and the astonishing. This book is filled with over 100 unique travel experiences that will inspire you to discover new destinations or find a new perspective on the classics. You know that it’s not just about the place, but who you meet and how you get there, and this guide guarantees you’ll have that all wrapped into one exciting package.

Bradt’s Freedom Pass London

If you are looking for inspiration for new walks to go on in 2025, the new, thoroughly updated second edition of Bradt’s Freedom Pass London brings to life the UK capital through 25 carefully curated walks that reveal historical landmarks, wildlife hotspots and quiet corners with fascinating pasts. As the title suggests, this travel guidebook is designed for the 1 million people who can enjoy free travel in central and Greater London thanks to the Freedom Pass, but its focus on walking destinations accessible by public transport makes it a must for anyone living in or visiting London.

Top Five Places to Volunteer this year

-by Carol Donaldson

In celebration of the publication of my book The Volunteers: A memoir of Conservation, Companionship and Community (Summersdale 2024) I would like to invite you to experience the joys of volunteering for yourself by exploring my list of the five best organisations to volunteer for in the UK.

TCV The Conservation Volunteers

TCV offered me my first every professional conservation job and have long been the standard bearers for volunteering. They were also ahead of their time at being an inclusive organisation. TCV run hundreds of volunteer projects across the UK including the Green Gym where you can get fit and make friends while doing anything from edible gardening to dry stone walling

2. The RSPB

Not just for birders. When I was 21 I spent two life changing weeks guarding an osprey nests from egg collectors on the RSPB’s Loch Garten reserve. I came away knowing I wanted a career in conservation. The RSPB are one of the few organisations to still offer short term residential volunteer opportunities. You could find yourself at the tip of Kent wardening the RSPB Dungeness reserve or monitoring bittern in the reedbeds at Blacktoft Sands.

Ten Street Trees to See Near Stanfords

By Paul Wood

My book, London’s Street Trees, which has just been published in an expanded and revised third edition, sets out to show you that London is in fact an urban arboretum. Any self-respecting botanical collection would be hard-pressed to grow the variety of trees that can be found gracing pavements across town. I reckon there are over 400 different species you can encounter in this great green city. No matter where you live, there are bound to be dozens growing within a few hundred metres of your front door.

To prove my point, I went in search of street trees near Stanfords’ Covent Garden shop. Here are ten different species I found:

Honey Locust (Gleditsia tricanthos) WC1. Image credit Paul Wood

1. Honey Locust, Slingsby Place – Just round the corner from Stanfords an elegant North American honey locust can be seen outside Bill’s restaurant. It is interesting to compare this tree to those on Endell Street, which you should approach with caution: they have weapons- grade thorns growing straight out of their trunks. The Slingsby Place tree is a thornless cultivar, so is a much safer bet for those intent on brushing up on their tree IDs.

Lonely Planet’s Guide to Death

Lonely Planet’s Guide to Death, Grief and Rebirth is an illuminating book that reveals how cultures and communities around the world grieve their loved ones – with lessons we can all learn from to help us all live (and die) well.

Divided into four key chapters: Celebrating, Commemorating, Mourning, and Offering, readers will discover resting places, burials, rituals, and symbols that have been associated with death throughout time.

Guest Post from Clare Hammond author of ‘On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar’

Being a map and travel bookshop, we are famous for showing people the world from the comfort of their armchairs. When we can’t travel somewhere, we really rely on maps, books and travel writers to help us learn about the history of a country and its people so we can keep ourselves informed. A perfect example of this is Clare Hammonds new book On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey Through Occupied Myanmar. Here she shares with us some things she has learnt while travelling by rail around Myanmar.

Tips for rail travel in Myanmar

By Clare Hammond

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Myanmar, I came across an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country – railways not shown on any other publicly available maps at the time.

It inspired me to pack a small backpack and set out on a three-month journey to piece together the story of why these mysterious railways were built. This journey would transform my understanding not only of Myanmar’s modern history but also of Britain’s colonial past. I hope my new book, On the Shadow Tracks, will inspire others to discover more about this shared history, including by (one day) travelling to Myanmar. Which brings me to my first tip for rail travel…

Guest Post: Chantal Lyons Shares the Top 5 Wild Boar rewilding sites in the UK to visit

We recently hosted an author talk with Chantal Lyons where she spoke about her book Groundbreakers: The Return Of Britain’s Wild Boar. In this book, Chantal moves to the boar’s stronghold of the Forest of Dean to get up close and personal with this complex, intelligent and quirky species, and she meets with people across Britain and beyond who celebrate their presence – or want them gone.

In this guest blog post, Chantal shares where in the UK you can visit these wonderful animals:

Three Enchanting Islands to visit in the Mediterranean

Travel with Laura Coffey through Greek Myth with Enchanted Islands, a magical story of love, loss and the real-life islands that inspired the oldest travel story of all time…

A lyrical odyssey about love, loss and Greek myth, Enchanted Islands is a new book that weaves together Laura’s experience navigating heartbreak and grief with her quest to map the real-life islands that inspired the wanderings of Homer’s epic hero, Odysseus. Stephen Fry called it “magical and captivating – hugely recommended” It’s not remotely academic, and you don’t need to know anything about Greek myth to enjoy it.

“If you love memoir and Greek mythology this is a delight. Coffey escapes a grim and lonely pandemic for volcanos and orange-blossom brioche, kingfishers and tales of Circe. But life lies ready to sting, like the Medusa jellyfish she encounters on her evening swims. A spellbinding book about growing up, grieving and the Gods” ― Clare Pollard, author of Delphi

Stanfords fans will love this book because it blends together travel and maps, two of our favourite things. And interestingly none of the islands Laura visited were in modern-day Greece. You’ll need to read the book to find out where she went…

Tips for Successful Family Adventures

Family Adventures is a practical guide to involving babies and children in all sorts of adventures, whether it be cycling, camping, paddling, hiking, swimming or outdoor holidays.

As soon as Bex Band, founder of the UK’s largest women’s adventure community, Love Her Wild, announced she was pregnant with her first child, the sympathy began. ‘Enjoy your adventures while you can’, ‘It’s going to be a big shock not being able to travel as much’, and ‘Aren’t you going to miss adventuring?’It seemed as though having children was a death sentence when you’re an outdoor adventurer.

But it really doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, it’s a scary prospect – how do you keep them safe? Where do they sleep? What equipment do you need? – but it’s totally doable.

This guide is full of useful information (such as what to pack when camping with an infant or how to keep children safe in open water), invaluable tips (family games you can play around a campfire or how to keep morale up in bad weather) and plenty of honesty around things going wrong (poo-explosion on a wild camp, anyone?). Experiences from adventuring families also provide a plethora of insights so that you’re well equipped to make your family adventuring dreams a reality.

Here, Bex Band offers some tips for successful family adventures:

Adventuring with children is very different from when you are managing a trip with just adults. Packing, logistics, managing distances and food intake – it’s all different. It took us a while to get the balance right and to realise where the struggles would come from and what to let go of.

10 Recommendations for National Walking Day

Happy National Walking Day. Today is the perfect day to plan your next walking adventure and we have some great products to help you on your way:

Ordnance Survey Explorer Maps

from £12.99

The Explorer series, Ordnance Survey’s most detailed maps recommended for anyone enjoying outdoor activities, provides topographic coverage of Great Britain at 1:25,000 on GPS compatible maps with hiking trails, cycling routes and extensive tourist information. Each printed map is available either on paper or as a waterproof and tear-resistant OS Active Map, as indicated in its title. Britain’s National Parks and other areas of particular tourist interest are presented on often double-sided OL (Outdoor Leisure) maps, whilst most standard format Explorers cover an area of 30 x 20km (approx. 19 x 12 miles).