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Few capitals carry the weight of Washington DC quite so visibly. The city was designed before it existed, laid out in the late eighteenth century by Pierre Charles L'Enfant on a grid of diagonal avenues radiating from the Capitol and the White House, and that deliberate geometry still shapes how visitors move through it. The Mall stretches nearly two miles from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol steps, flanked by the Smithsonian's constellation of museums, and the whole arrangement feels less like a city that grew organically and more like a civic argument made in stone and marble.

The neighbourhoods beyond the ceremonial core tell a different story. Georgetown predates the federal district itself, its Federal-style townhouses and cobbled streets along the Potomac giving it a texture that the planned avenues lack. Capitol Hill, east of the Capitol, is a residential neighbourhood of Victorian rowhouses where congressional staffers and long-established families share the same blocks. Dupont Circle draws a younger, more international crowd, its bookshops and embassies and weekend farmers market occupying a part of the city that feels genuinely lived-in. Shaw and U Street, once the centre of DC's Black Broadway in the early twentieth century, carry a musical and cultural history that runs deep beneath the surface of the present.