New York

Draw a line across Manhattan at 24th Street, and to our minds everything good on the island happens below it. We lived in New York for three years, which was like a three-year holiday, and the city took hold of us. Some people come and do not get it. They have spent their days in Midtown and Hell's Kitchen, which is not their fault: someone has to tell you how to do New York properly.

So stay downtown or in Brooklyn. Midtown is Times Square and office towers, the New York most first-time visitors picture and the most crowded part of it. Uptown earns a quick visit, for the Upper East and West Sides and Central Park, which opened in 1858 with winding paths and sunken roads to break from the grid.

Downtown is older than the grid. The numbered streets of 1811 begin above the tangle of downtown and Greenwich Village, and the tangle is where to walk, from the West Village east to Alphabet City and down to Chinatown around Mott and Canal Streets. Then the waterfront round the southern half of the island, on foot or by bike, with the car-free Hudson River Greenway up the west side. We would count it among the best things to do in New York.

Brooklyn is across the East River, a tidal strait that has got away with being called a river. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge, 1.1 miles to Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO, or cycle the Williamsburg Bridge. Each neighbourhood has a personality of its own, one hipper than the next, and the food alone is reason enough to cross. Roberta's, in Bushwick, has a courtyard bar with more places to drink around it, for anyone in no hurry to cross back.

Come between late April and early June, or from mid-September to October. July and August are hot, and humid enough to feel hotter than the thermometer says. The last two weeks of December bring the Christmas crowds and prices, and an estimated million people in Times Square on New Year's Eve, which is Midtown's problem.

New York has a reputation as a lonely city, and we found the opposite. People have come from all over the world to live there, so they are quick to take in whoever arrives next, and to us it was far friendlier than London or most places we have been. We made some of the best friends of our lives there.