Washington Audio Tours

Washington DC was drawn on a blank piece of land in 1791 by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French engineer with a grand plan and very wide diagonal boulevards. The result is a city that feels intentional from above and slightly disorienting on the ground, where avenues named after states cut across a numbered and lettered grid at odd angles. The National Mall runs two kilometres from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, lined with the Smithsonian's dozen-plus museums, all free, a fact that still feels slightly improbable. The Mall was also the site of Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), and the Lincoln Memorial where Marian Anderson sang in 1939 after the DAR refused her Constitution Hall.

The city beyond the monuments is what rewards lingering.

Georgetown predates Washington itself, with Federal-era townhouses on cobbled streets and a canal towpath that still runs along the Potomac. Adams Morgan is where the Ethiopian restaurants cluster -- DC has one of the largest Ethiopian communities in the United States and the injera-and-stews on 18th Street are the real thing. Capitol Hill is a residential neighbourhood of row houses and independent bookshops that exists ten minutes from the most photographed building in America and feels almost defiantly normal about it.