Shanghai Select

Washington is known around the world for its power, symbolized in television news bulletins with the White House or Capitol as background images. But it is the sheer beauty of the place that attracts millions of people to visit the capital city each year, and that continues to surprise and delight the more than half a million souls who call it home. Among such residents are architectural photographer John Cleave and architecture critic Benjamin Forgey, who collaborated to produce this book celebrating Washington's many, and varied, claims.

The city's beauty is no accident. Washington was founded not long after the Revolutionary War as a visionary experiment, a place intended to embody the highest ideals of the young American democracy. These ambitions were inscribed in the audacious city plan created by Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a multi-talented associate of George Washington - the most important of the city's founders and, not incidentally, the hero for whom the capital was named.

John Cleave's illustrations - over 180 of them, computer generated from his original photography - embrace both famous views and the hidden corners that give Washington its character. In images and words Cleave and Forgey chronicle the city's transformation from near-wilderness to world capital. In so doing, they provide a memorable portrait of an endlessly fascinating - and beautiful - city.

The best way of discovering London is on foot or from the top of a bus. No other large cuty is more rewarding to wander around, with a wealth of interesting things to see, both grand and intimate in scale. Watercolour painter Graham Byfield set out to capture the essence of the place, and his impressions are recorded in the London Sketchbook.

Britain's capital is varied and cosmopolitan. It has no formally planned centre; each area has its own particular style and atmosphere. Central London is the setting for parliament, royal palaces, formal squares and grand hotels. The City is the financial district, but it is also rich in architecture, including Sir Christopher Wren's greatest work. Much was destroyed here in the Second World War; but the City has seen a flowering of daring and innovtive modern architecture, contrastign with the sober mass of the Tower of London, parts of it nearly a thousand years old. Byfield savours the village-like atmosphere of Hampstead and Islington to the north, and the 19th-century residential and museum areas of the west, from Chelsea and Kensington up to Notting Hill and Bayswater. For many people, including many Londoners, much that lies soouth of the River Thames is undiscovered territory, but the London Sketchbook shows not only the formal splendours of Greenwich, but also the terraced houses of Stockwell and Battersea, and the adaptation of great industrial buildings such as the Bankside Power Station, now the Tate Modern art gallery.

The sketches are accompanied by notes handwritten by the artist. There is an introduction on London, its history and its buildings by the architectural writer and conservationist Marcus Binney, who has also contributed a Gazetteer with more detailed information on the buildings shown in this book.