Bland and beautiful

Buckingham Palace is a "graceless colossus" and "about as bland as it's possible to be", according to a new guide.

However Tate Modern is hailed as a "wonderful hotchpotch of wild and wacky art" in the London Directions guide from the Rough Guides company.

The guide also criticises the National Portrait Gallery, which it calls an "overstuffed shrine to famous Brits", while the Barbican is dismissed as "a monumental concrete ghetto".

But there is praise for various landmarks. The guide's author said that while he sometimes cursed the city, it could be "the most beautiful, romantic, heady place in the world".

Highlights include the Houses of Parliament - a "gargantuan, confident neo-Elizabethan expression of nationhood" - and the London Eye, which is described as "magnificent" and "graceful". And, the book says, despite the scruffy pigeons and traffic noise, Trafalgar Square is "still one of London's grandest architectural set-pieces".