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the Grapevine Great British Editor Daryl Burton Website: www.grapevineguides.co.uk 
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Vegetarian Britain by Alex Bourke & Katrina Holland Website: www.vegetarianguides.com 
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I've put these two "head-to-head" to see how they compare. The Grapevine guide is the newest and was released this year, Vegetarian Britain is coming up to two years old. Grapevine just lists restaurants and has 130 fewer pages. Although only a centimetre smaller in width, for me it fits comfortably in the hand between thumb and fingers. Vegetarian Britain with its additional size and weight (640g compared to 405g) becomes a bit tiring to hold and browse through.
Both guides have indexes at the back by location and restaurant name. I'd like to see a graphical reference on an inside cover that would quickly direct you to the pages for any given region. Both books have a contents section showing how the book is organised alphabetically by County (V.B.) or region (Grapevine). In my mind Grapevine has more, and makes better use of, regional maps at the start of each section but Vegetarian Britain has much better maps of London.
Thankfully, both guide are free of all those pesky little symbols so often used for keys. The typical Grapevine format is a half page per restaurant. This seems about the right length. The printing is in yellow and black. I found that in low light conditions the white on yellow heading giving you the type of restaurant (Vegetarian, Omnivorous, etc) and the side printed County name became unreadable. Other than that the layout is very good and easy to use. The book doesn't have any photos or advertisements which help to make it a bit lighter. For some strange reason the web address for individual restaurants is not given. This is a major flaw.
Vegetarian Britain has several black and white pictures and advertisements for the usual animal rights and vegetarian organisations. Whether you want to see a picture of fox with it's head ripped off, or a cat with electrodes in its head whilst you browse for somewhere to have your lunch is another matter. Entries seem to be either a whole page or a brief snippet. I tended to get bored reading the whole pages and I think they could easily be edited down to half a page. If this was done and the virtually blank pages that separate Counties were removed the book would be slimmed down by quite a few pages. Where Vegetarian Britain has the edge is the extra content for places to stay and health food shops, although the coverage of the latter is rather patchy.
These are both well prepared books although with the subject matter in a constant state of flux they can soon become dated. The one time I used Vegetarian Britain when on holiday the restaurant had shut down. A quick trip to the tourist information office gave me the address of two local vegetarian restaurants not listed in the book. I would give preference to a cheap compact book that is produced on a yearly basis. It can't be that difficult to store all the information in a database and then churn out a new book in a very short amount of time. Maybe the way to go in the future is to have a pay or subscription service whereby the latest information can be downloaded to your mobile phone.