Just as London has been a popular centre for film activity over the years, it's also created an industry of books about using the city as a location.

The latest is Movie London which attempts to craft a practical and informative guide to the capital's movie heritage. Tony Reeves has been written with the tourist in mind and the desire to explore on foot. As such the reader is provided with a series of maps and transport advice, along with references to other places of interest, including bars and restaurants. He's determined to capture the cultural flavour of each area too, pointing out landmarks and other local amenities, so it become more than just a film reference book and transforms itself into a film-themed guide book. For example, if you take his advice and stroll through Crouch End, you'll find directions to pizza parlours, Alexandra palace, the famed centre of early TV broadcasts, as well as all the street names where the likes of Long Good Friday, Vera Drake and Shaun of the Dead were filmed. Alternatively, you can head for Old Street "for a detour to Yorkshire with maybe just a whiff of Minnesota", referring to alleged British comedy Blow Dry. It's this combination of practical advice rubbing shoulders with anecdotal, wry comments that gives the book its added spark.

To aid further exploration there's an appendix, which concisely summarises a selection of bars, restaurants, and historic sites. Colour plates are included which focus on specific themes such as the city's big screen literary heritage, the dark worlds of gangsters and horror, along with the London of Hitchcock and James Bond. Strangely all the illustrations are the streets and houses as they are now, there are no pics from the films themselves. Perhaps that's how it should be. After all, this is the London you will always see and not only fleetingly in cinemas.

Movie London is a dense, compact guide, cramming a great deal of information into its pages, but with infuriatingly postage-stamp sized photos. It feels like the big screen, big city experience has been miniaturised even if it remains a little too big for the pocket. However, the vitality comes from the mischievously irreverent writing not the illustrations. Reeves has a movie-buff's enthusiasm to soak up information and pour it out with a finely tuned wit. It's a fun read without being fastidious.