St. Petersburg is, “without doubt, one of the world’s most exquisite cities. Yes, it is flanked by meretricious modern design, encircled by brutal Soviet-era, high-rise apartment blocks and smells of grinding poverty. Its water is often unsafe to drink, its crowded trolley-buses are rusting away and its pavements are forced to tackle the shifts of fetid marshland below them. But, when you walk along Nevsky Prospect or catch sight of any of the city’s brightly coloured, set-piece buildings, when you spy the golden spires of fairy-tale fortresses and heavenly churches or the seemingly infinite march of classical arcades, their vaults lit by the sun sparkling from the Dutch and Venetian-style canals, you feel that this is paradise, not urban purgatory.”