Stockholm is Cultural Capital of Europe this year. For information call +46 8 698 1998. Start the day on an artistic note and have a stroll around the Moderna Museet (+46 8 666 4250) - Stockholm’s museum of modern art - reopened in February under the directorship of British curator David Elliot in premises designed by Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo. Nobel prizewinners, politicos, statespersons and agitators all pass through here.
Take a walk down to the waterfront, where the old National Art Museum (+46 8 666 4250) is pretty good too, though many of its works by the turn-of-the-century artist and interiors guru, Carl Larsson, will remain at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. But go anyway, if only to see the unexpectedly exquisite painting by the writer August Strindberg, particularly his myopic study of a fly agaric mushroom in the snow.
The Vasamuseet (+46 8 666 4800), which displays a 17th-century boat dredged up and restored, is most spectacular, a soaring hulk in a dry dock, lit as if in a Grand Guignol drama, with masterly light and shadow.
It takes a special city to make a boat museum interesting, and Stockholm has many other refreshing little differences from the average Western capital. There are few homeless people or derelicts: good for us, and good for them, too. Bar-life is non-aggressive, and street crime is low, and the streets and air are clean - though, granted, there may be a few patches of vomit at weekends, for this is a society that drinks.
End the morning at the central square of Hötorget in the food hall Hötorgshallen (no general telephone number, as each stall has its own separate number), which is an excellent place to buy gravadlax, pickles and reindeer sausages to take home. Above the department store PUB, where Greta Garbo once worked in the hat department, the City Hotel has several green army bicycles - one speed, with back-pedal brakes - which it lends to tourists free of charge. Borrow one of these lumps of military hardware and prepare to wobble away.
Cycle off through the relatively traffic-free streets, across Gamla Stan to Södermalm. This is a working-class suburb undergoing gentrification, somewhat like Berlin’s Kreuzberg, but less gritty. First, stop at Gotgatan 31 (no tel.number available) , a huge design shop-cum-hangout for the youthful and creative, filled with fashion, design and cosmetics concessions as well as an enormous newsagent’s and café divided by a chic glass wall.
Also in ‘Söder’ is another novel concept: the Café String, Nytorgsgatan 38 (+46 8 714 8514), an antique shop-cum-café which sells coffee alongside Fifties and Sixties bric-a-brac. Caffeined-up, pedal over to Foam, in Karlavagen 75 (+ 46 8 660 0996), a coffee house designed by Davis and Cederlund in the smart north-eastern district of Ostermalm. Gilded (and would-be) youths sprawl here, enjoying being good-looking and rich.
Pay a visit to what promises to be genuine Stockholm: a brace of brunch parlours that are like walking into Carl Larsson paintings. The first place to try is Lasse i Parken, Högalidsgatan 56 (+46 8 658 3395) a small, traditional, eaved hut painted in the red-through-terracotta that echoes across Sweden’s vernacular housing. Inside are tables and chairs, low ceilings, the inevitable stove and a counter serving food from where you take your meatball open sandwich into the garden to eat among the daisies. Then cross the bridge onto the island of Långholmen and find another house-cum-restaurant called Karlhälls Gård (+46 8 668 0710); again achingly cute, with a garden that leads down to a beach on the lake where Stockholmers swim in the summer. Some stay on Långholmen, for on this small, green island is a cheapish hotel in a converted prison.
To end the afternoon, shopping beckons, so cycle off to the area around Rörstrandgatan, in west Stockholm, where a gentle bohemianism is expressed in cosy cafés and cheapish antiques shops full of pewter and Sunday paintings of summer houses. At the end of the street, one can see into the countryside without the intervening hindrance of suburbs - an experience that elevates the spirits and reminds one that anywhere in Stockholm is just half-an-hour from nature in the raw: forests, lakes, the whole shebang.
What of Stockholm’s nightlife? It is best to head for Stureplan, Stockholm’s Piccadilly Circus, and hop around venues like the Hotel Lydmar (+46 8 566 113 00) - a jazz/soul bar and restaurant with a fine hotel attached where guests check in inside the bar - and throbbing bars like Biblos in Biblioteksgatan 9 ( +46 8 611 8030); East in Stureplan 13 (+46 8 611 4959) and the O-Bar (+46 8 679 8750) which is part of and adjacent to the Sturehof restaurant in Stureplan 2, a traditional venue where one can scoff several types of herring before moving the few yards to the bar to swill akvavit and beer. But perhaps the most interesting is the Spy Bar, Birger Jarls Gatan 20 (+46 8 611 6500), which with its lounging and eating areas and crowded dance-floor is like a cross between a London members’ club and a rampant disco. At weekends a young crowd mills around its antique ceramic stoves.
A pub crawl inevitably involves queuing, though when you finally make it inside, there is usually loads of space as it is merely a device to attract custom. Well, it does stop one from drinking too fast - a smallish beer is a wallet-basher at about SEK45 (£3.60-£4). Apart from queues there are few problems with door policy as Stockholm is inclusive, to use William Hague’s buzz word, and in few places does one feel like an intruder. That’s Swedish egalitarianism for you.
Another (slightly cooler) bar zone is on Kungstradgatan, where the most famous bar- restaurant in Sweden, Café Opera, Opera House, Kungstärdgården (+46 8 676 5807) operates. Some Stockholmers may reckon it is past it - ‘Full of Finns,’ is one sneer you may hear - but it is undeniably elegant. Make for its Art Nouveau room upstairs. Just up Kungstradgatan is the glassy, modern bar Akvarium, Kungstärdgården (+46 8 100 626), which opens on to the park in an agreeable manner.
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