Stockholm travel guide

STOCKHOLM comes lauded as Sweden's most beautiful city, and apart from some sad central squares of concrete developments and a tangled road junction or two, it lives up to it - it's delightful, not least as a contrast to the apparently endless lakes and forests of the rest of the country.

It's also a remarkably disparate capital, one whose tracts of water and range of monumental buildings give it an ageing, lived-in feel and an atmosphere quite at odds with its status as Sweden's most contemporary, forward-looking city.

Built on fourteen small islands, Stockholm was a natural site for the fortifications, erected by one Birger Jarl in 1255, that grew into the current city.

In the sixteenth century, the city fell to King Gustav Vasa, a century later becoming the centre of the Swedish trading empire that covered present-day Scandinavia.

Following the waning of Swedish power it entered something of a quiet period, only rising to prominence again in the nineteenth century when industrialization sowed the seeds of the Swedish economic miracle

The Stadshuset , Hantverkargatan 1 (guided tours: mid-May to Sept daily 10am, noon & 2pm; rest of year 10am & noon; 50kr; T-Centralen), at the water's edge near Central Station, and in particular its gently-tapering 106-metre high red-brick tower (May-Sept daily 10am-4.30pm; 15kr), has the best fix on the city's layout.

The building itself, a flagship of the National Romantic movement in the 1910s and 1920s, draws heavily on Swedish materials and themes, exemplified in the cavernous Blue Room, where the Nobel prize-givings are held, and the Golden Room, where a précis of Swedish history covers the walls in a gilt mosaic.