New York

New York City resists summary. It is simultaneously a financial capital, an art world, a fashion industry, a food city, and a collection of distinct urban villages that happen to share a subway system. The version of New York most visitors encounter — Midtown, Times Square, the top of the Empire State Building — is real but peripheral to how the city actually lives. The neighbourhoods are where it makes sense: the brownstone blocks of Brooklyn Heights, the warehouses-turned-galleries of Chelsea, the fish markets and dim sum parlours of Flushing, the Dominican bodegas and Caribbean bakeries of Washington Heights. Each of the five boroughs has its own character and its own reasons to visit.

The cultural infrastructure is staggering in its depth. The Metropolitan Museum of Art alone contains more than two million objects and could occupy a week without exhausting itself; the permanent collection at MoMA defines the canon of modern art; the Frick Collection sits in a Gilded Age mansion on the Upper East Side and contains one of the finest small collections in the world. But New York's cultural life also operates far outside institutional walls — in the jazz clubs of Harlem, the experimental performance spaces of the East Village, the record shops and vintage stores that fill the side streets of Williamsburg, and the street art that covers the underpasses of the outer boroughs.

Central Park is the city's great shared space: 843 acres of landscaped terrain at the centre of Manhattan where the density of the surrounding grid simply stops. It is worth crossing in both directions and at different times of day. The High Line, a disused elevated railway converted into a public park on the West Side, offers a different kind of urban walking — above the streets, through a planted corridor with views into the meatpacking district below. Take the subway everywhere and budget more time than you think you need. New York rewards the visitor who commits to its pace rather than fighting it.