Relocating to London
 

I have been an avid participant in Fodors and love the input from everyone on various travels (more recently Argentina, Chile, Israel, France) but now we are relocating from Chicago to London. We leave next week. The details are in place for work and home but we are looking forward to recommendations of your favorite websites for locals about London or the UK generally. For example, is there a website for London like "pagesjaunes" for Paris that lets you search for kinds of shops and services and shows you maps of streets with all the shops and services indicated? I found www.mappy.com but it is more limited than pagesjaunes. Looking forward to our new adventure!

Lucky you! Where in London will you be living? Just curious as London is one of my fave cities.

Streetsensation shows shops, restos, etc. on some of London's major streets:

http://www.streetsensation.co.uk/

Try http://www.upmystreet.com/

The exact equivalent of pagesjaunes is www.yell.com (not quite as good in terms of maps and particularly photos).

You might also like to browse www.timeout.com and www.urban75.com.

A further thought - you'll find that there's a lot information in media focussed on relatively small neighbourhoods rather than London-wide, particularly local newspapers. One website equivalent is www.myvillage.com

Hi laurie_ann,

Welcome! Hope the unusually chilly weather (a little flurries in London this week) here doesn't dissapoint you. Remember we're going into summertime this weekend.
For directory, i use both yell.com and directory.co.uk/ .
As for other useful websites,

Street map
http://www.multimap.com/ (Use the advanced option to get the map).

Route planner
http://www.theaa.com/travel/index.jsp and http://www.rac.co.uk/ (go under route planner)

LU http://www.tfl.gov.uk/ (Journey Planner is very good--just use the addresses or postal codes).

Let me know if you want other tips.

There were a lot of threads on fodors in the autumn last year with a variety of US women chatting about how they dealt with London. There are a number of self help groups as well. I suggest you need to search fodors and any other of the travel guides to get a lot of the basics. Critical issues from memory were

You need a network
You need to understand the Tube
You need to know how much the company is giving you to live
You need ot understand how expensive property in London is and the running costs with rates etc.
Schools are a whole thing again
Do you need a car?

Good luck

Forget about websites.

Buy Time Out (the magazine) weekly and the Evening Standard (buy: don't rely on the freesheets given away at stations) daily.

Many thanks for the great tips! We are off on Tuesday!

if you are a woman of means...the most important 3 words for you to know:

'domicile of origin'.

Oh, I forgot to warn you about the drycleaning bill. It's about 2-3x what I used to pay in NY. Hope the company is giving you generous COLA (cost of living adjustments).

On the positive side, you've already sorted out the housing, and you can visit various cities for extended weekend "city break" tours.

Can anyone remember the website for US expats in the UK?

Theater-wise, Broadwaybox.com/london - all the discounts to the show.