A rough guide to Martin Dunford: an interview with the Charlton-born co-founder of the revolutionary travel guide series Rough Guides, restaurateur and owner of UK travel website Cool Places
By Ben West
For someone who’s career has been dominated by travel – as co-founder, publisher and writer at travel guide company Rough Guides, a travel journalist and editor, and owner of UK travel website coolplaces.co.uk – it’s gratifying to hear that Charlton-born Martin Dunford chooses to remain living in southeast London.
“I like the fact that you have all the benefits of living in London and not many of the drawbacks,” he says. “Like access to central London. Having lived in Camden and Finsbury Park, I came back here because of my roots. I wanted a gentler version of London. It feels a bit more of a neighbourhood and less transient than the places in the north where I was. And it’s become more connected to the rest of London.
“I love walking along the river, and the park, and I love walking my dog on Blackheath. A lot hasn’t changed – for example the British Oak pub at Blackheath Standard looks the same as it did probably 50 years ago.”
But it’s not all perfect.
“What I don’t like is the Blackwall Tunnel. Despite having said I feel more connected, there’s only one river crossing, despite all the developments both sides of the river, so I particularly hate that. And central Greenwich and Blackheath Village would be much better if they were pedestrianised. They’d be so nice without all the traffic.”
We meet at Buenos Aires restaurant in Nelson Road in the centre of Greenwich, which he opened in conjunction with his sister Kate and her husband, Reinaldo Varga, who appropriately originated from Buenos Aires in Argentina. They also have a sister restaurant in Blackheath, and until last year also had a Buenos Aires cafe in Royal Hill, Greenwich.
“The cafe was the first step into the hospitality business for Kate and Reinaldo, in 2007. It was a bit of a step in the dark, but Kate had a clear idea of what she wanted.
“It’s all in the detail, doing it well. For example, Renaldo makes really good coffee. It’s not just about having the right equipment, but how to make it properly, and things like sourcing good bread and pastries. Mostly it was a place for hanging out for people in West Greenwich. They created a really nice vibe.”
They realised they could be successful in hospitality but found that it’s difficult to make much money with a cafe, and it’s more a lifestyle career. So they wanted to create a genuine Argentinian restaurant, and found a site in Blackheath Village.
“Although for some reason people had failed again and again at the Blackheath site it became popular very quickly. It only has 30 covers upstairs so they had to open the downstairs, a windowless basement. A lot of things are homemade, for example the chorizo is made from a family recipe. The chops are cut in the restaurant – all these things make a difference.
“Kate had eye for the look of the place: mismatched tables, a slightly old-fashioned look. It was casual, somewhere you could come with the kids but also good to visit as a couple. They had a clear idea of what to do. You can make money from a restaurant, but not so much from a small restaurant, so they looked for a bigger restaurant and this Greenwich one appeared. It was a new lease so we had to put a lot of money into it. Someone said that it’s the law of Pi, you multiply by 3.14 of your original budget, and they were just about right. We spent the best part of a year building the orangerie at the back.
“This one has been open for four years. It has a josper oven for cooking proper barbecue food. People immediately think Argentine food will be meat-dominated, but there’s other stuff on the menu too. There’s a lot for vegans and vegetarians, and we serve fish here, although not in Blackheath.”
Martin attended John Roan School, and in 1981, after graduating from university in Canterbury and teaching English in Greece, he met fellow traveller Mark Ellingham, which started the evolution of the Rough Guide titles to more than 200 destinations that we know today.
Mark had been given £600 to write a Rough Guide to Greece. He wanted to do something different: at the time, guidebooks were either cost-obsessed student guides or heavyweight cultural publications. The Rough Guide series were instead written in an engaging, journalistic style and were initially aimed at low-budget backpackers, although grew to embrace travellers with higher budgets in time.
With the initial book being received well, along with Mark and the other two founders, Martin started commissioning friends and other writers to write further guidebooks, as well as writing guides himself. There was no rigid business plan, and the book series just grew and grew, at a time when travel was growing hugely.
“Rough Guides was great,” he says. “It was great timing for us and Lonely Planet, we rode the crest of that wave. It’s something I’m very close to, but we sold it to Dorling Kindersley and Penguin and spent a lot of time battling with them to transform ourselves digitally, as people increasingly moved from printed guidebooks to online. But as the level of sales got more problematic, there was less of a chance to get a sufficient budget. Also, I put a lot of time into building our US presence but we closed the US office in 2007. It was disappointing so I thought it was time to move on and did so in 2009 after 27 years. It’s since been sold and is a much smaller company now. I still write the Norfolk/Suffolk book for them, but have stopped writing the others I authored.
“If I woke up this morning I wouldn’t come up with the idea of a guidebook. Digital has produced many more specialisms, and that idea of documenting everywhere and documenting everything is at the end of its life. Guides today need to be more specialised, inspirational and selective to get peoples’ attention, and not try and be the expert on everything from hostels to historic sites.”
Martin’s next project was the Cool Places website, which covers travel in the UK.
“Cool Places was born out of having done Rough Guides and realising that the UK was a terrible place we wanted to escape in the 1980s, with bad food and rubbish places to stay. And now we have this reinvention of British cuisine and hotels, it’s no longer a place full of crap B&Bs.
“The country itself hadn’t changed, it was still diverse and historic and on our doorstep. But people had been travelling more and seeing more, and so the bar had been raised. So Cool Places came out of celebrating these places, digitally. To give people places to visit, walks, places to stay and eat. To open up the UK, like Rough Guides, but by being much more selective.
“For every pub with bad service and food there will be a great one, arguably as good and more varied than in Europe. Italy, for example, has great food but it’s often the same food all around the country. There’s a diversity in the UK.
“It’s evolved into a website focused on accommodation. The difference is that we have a lot of other content too. We’re trying to be a lot more contemporary about Britain. We’ve produced a book, and next year we’re doing a book featuring pubs with rooms and another about dog-friendly accommodation. You reach far fewer people with a book but there’s a prestige to it that a website doesn’t have. People get more inspired looking at a book rather than scanning through a website. A book encourages you to savour these places.”
So if he couldn’t live in south London, where would he live?
“Italy, Rome, or the UK countryside. But I’d find it hard not to have anywhere in London to go to. I feel living here when I take the dog for a walk I can bump into two or three people I know. I can’t imagine a better place to live. There’s a sense of belonging but also anonymity. It’s so neighbourly.”
