9th Philips Road Atlas Britain 10.99

Philips Road Atlas Britain
RRP 10.99
Best of the web 9.99 at play.com

Overall

Performance
This map is drawn to a scale of 1:200,000, which strikes a good balance between detail and clarity. Pages can feel a little cluttered, especially around major conurbations, but this is partly alleviated by the excellent town maps.

Ease of operation
The labelling is good, making it easy to find anywhere you need. The near A3-sized proportions make it a touch unwieldy at times, as does the gap between pages at the seam, which is exacerbated by the spiral-binder. Speed camera sites are marked with speed limits.

Buying
We found online discounts hard to come by, and even with freebies such as two clip-on place markers, there are far better atlases out there for the money.

Quality
There's nothing wrong with the cardboard outer covers, but they won't be particularly durable, either. The paper quality doesn't feel very good, either, raising the prospect of torn pages.

Special features
Everything from restricted junction details, a distance table, overview maps and town maps (including major cities and ports across the Channel) is here, and they are all done to a high quality. The clip-on place markers are a useful freebie, too. Perhaps least useful is the feature on speeding penalties, which seems more concerned with how to avoid penalties than with driving more safely.