Rotterdam

Rotterdam is the Dutch city that had to start again: the bombs of May 1940 erased its centre in a morning, and instead of rebuilding what was lost the city built what nobody had seen — a skyline of towers on the Maas, a market hall shaped like a horseshoe with a painted sky inside, houses tilted into cubes on stilts, a bridge like a swan, a station like a knife. It is Europe's largest port, and the harbour still runs forty kilometres to the sea; it is also, quietly, the country's capital of architecture, food halls and the kind of bar street that Amsterdam lost to its own visitors.

The traveller crosses the Erasmus Bridge on foot for the skyline and again by water taxi for the speed; eats through the Markthal and looks up; climbs into a Cube House to see how one lives on a tilt; drinks on Witte de Withstraat and visits the Boijmans's mirrored depot; takes the harbour boat past the cranes and the ships; finds Delfshaven, the one old corner the bombs missed, where the Pilgrims sailed from; and ends at the Hotel New York on the Kop van Zuid, the old ocean-liner office where a million emigrants once bought passage, for a plate of oysters and the lights coming on across the water.

The Guide's honesty: Rotterdam is a working city, not a postcard, and it wins over visitors slowly and completely — give it two days, not an afternoon —; the wind off the river is a permanent resident and the cyclists own the lanes, so look both ways twice; the museums close on Mondays; the metro and trams are cheap and quick, and the water taxi is worth every euro once; and the city's honesty about its own scar — the fire-boundary line still marked in the pavement — is part of what makes it, in the end, the most modern place in the country.