Hamburg

Glass sits on the brick of an old warehouse, so the halves read as different materials. The Plaza at 37 metres is an open level with the harbour on every side. You need a ticket from the entrance to go up. The curved escalator up to it hides its own far end.

Red brick warehouses stand on oak piles with canals threading between them. The water level moves with the tides, so the same bridge gives a different photograph each time.

It stands with the biggest model railways anywhere, and every fifteen minutes the lights swing from daylight to full night. On the model airport the planes run down the runway and lift off. Entry is by time slot, so it needs booking a day ahead.

It is 452 steps to the gallery in the tower, with a lift beside the stairs. Ships working the harbour steered by it. Sailors cut the name down and call it nothing but the Michel.

The market does not open except on Sunday before dawn, and the stalls are down by 9:30am. In winter it starts two hours later. Stallholders shout prices and pile extra into the bag, and inside the auction hall a band plays.

The piers float, rising and dropping as the water does, joined to the shore by hinged ramps. Ferry 62 runs on an ordinary transit ticket, which makes it far cheaper than a harbour cruise. It crosses to the far bank and brings you back on the same fare.

From May to September a show of light and music plays over the lake fountains each evening. The tea house on the Japanese garden side is open a few hours a day only.

A dammed river makes the lake, so sailing boats sit in the city centre. A circuit of the outer basin runs a little over 7 kilometres and crowds with morning runners. In a hard freeze a market opens on the ice, which a century sees only a few times.

It was cut in 1911, and cars still go down to the riverbed in lifts. People on foot take the spiral stairs, and the crossing measures 426 metres. Crabs, flatfish and eels are set into the tiles along the walls.

There are 647 rooms, and a guided route takes in just a few. The goddess on the courtyard fountain stands for clean water, put up after the cholera year of 1892.

St Pauli's nightlife strip, its theatres, bars and clubs lit all night. The Beatles cut their teeth in clubs here in the early 1960s, and on Beatles-Platz five steel outlines of the band stand. Screened-off Herbertstrasse is closed to women and minors.

An office block of millions of bricks, built in 1924 for a shipowner enriched by Chilean saltpetre. Its eastern corner tapers to a point like the bow of a liner, and looking up from that tip is the classic photo. With its office district, it is World Heritage.

Of a church wrecked in the 1943 air raids only the spire was kept, and the ruin stands as a memorial against war. A glass lift climbs to a deck at 76 metres, high over docks and the Rathaus roof. Beneath the ruined nave, an exhibition records the bombing.

A public transport boat from Landungsbrucken to Finkenwerder, valid with an ordinary bus ticket. It passes the container terminals and the Ovelgonne shore, a view to rival any tour boat. Open seats on the upper deck go first, so wait near the front.

A former fishing village clinging to the Elbe hillside, its white houses linked by a maze of narrow stairways. A small bus nicknamed the mountain goat winds up lanes too tight for cars. From the sandy shore below, big container ships slide past close by.

An art museum right beside the main station, three buildings joined underground. Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog hangs here, always with a knot of people before it. The white cube building holds contemporary art.

Opened in 1907 by the animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck, the first zoo to separate animals with moats and rocks instead of bars. Still owned by the Hagenbeck family, it is the only major German zoo run without regular state subsidy.

A park cemetery opened in 1877, as large as a district, with buses running inside it. Locals come to stroll among ponds, rhododendron groves and sculpted graves. Without the plan handed out at the main gate office, getting lost is easy.