Central Dubai’s largest open space, Creek Park provides a welcome splash of greenery and some much-needed breathing space amidst the surrounding concrete and traffic. The park is strung out along the south side of the Creek, with pleasant breezes and fine views over the water to the pretty, Moroccan-style blue domes of the Park Hyatt hotel and the futuristic clubhouse...

The waterfront alongside the Creek in central Deira is where you’ll find the dhow wharfage, one of Dubai’s most unlikely and memorable sights. Dozens of traditional old wooden boats tie up along the waterside here to load and unload cargo, with sweating stevedores carting cargo along narrow gangplanks and huge piles of merchandise – anything from packets of soap to cars – ranged on the pavement...

It’s in the far south of the city that you get the best sense of Dubai’s amazing recent growth. Barely ten years ago this entire area was largely desert, virtually undeveloped apart from a discrete string of luxury hotels lined up along the beach. Then the developers arrived, and skyscrapers began shooting up out of the sands on a daily...

Dubai Marina is where you’ll find one of the city’s premier stretches of beach: an impressively wide stretch of golden sand, backed by a long line of huge high-rises. Most people head for the strip of free beach in the heart of the Marina between the Sheraton and Hilton hotels, which has plenty of white sand to loll about on and...

Ranged along the Creek south of Garhoud lies the shiny modern Festival City, one of Dubai’s newest and largest purpose-built neighbourhoods. Finished in 2008, this self-contained city-within-a-city comes complete with everything that Dubai’s developers generally consider essential for 21st-century city living, including posh apartments and villas, offices, a golf course, marina, shopping mall and a pair of swanky five-star hotels...

Lying alongside the Creek south of Deira, the busy inner-city suburb of Garhoud is best known as the home of the city’s international airport, meaning that it’s usually rammed with traffic night and day, while the formless concrete sprawl surrounding the airport’s three terminals isn’t anything to write home about either. The rest of the area offers a slightly schizophrenic...

The biggest of all Dubai’s recent mega-developments, the Palm Jumeirah is the world’s largest man-made island, and has doubled the length of the Dubai coastline at a total cost of over $12 billion. Often billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”, the island is designed in the shape of a palm tree, with a central “trunk” and a series...

The best single reason for trawling out to Sharjah is to visit the city’s outstanding Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization, occupying the impeccably restored Souk al Majara, sat next to the waterfront and topped with a distinctive golden dome. It’s beautifully presented and well explained, even if the rather self-congratulatory signage attached to some of the exhibits can occasionally grate....

The Creekside district of Shindagha is one of the oldest areas of the city, and perhaps the place where you get the clearest sense of what old Dubai once looked like. Although it’s now been virtually swallowed up by Bur Dubai, until the 1960s Shindagha remained quite separate, divided by an inlet (roughly where the Shindagha Tower now is) which...

The modest little Shindagha Tower stands on the waterfront a few minutes’ walk west of the Textile Souk, marking the edge of Shindagha district, the Creekside area which was once home to the city’s ruling sheikhs and other local bigwigs (many of whose fine old houses can still be seen strung out along the waterfront). The tower itself is one...

Slicing its way through the middle of the city centre between the districts of Bur Dubai and Deira, the Creek (Al Khor in Arabic) remains very much the physical and cutural heart of old Dubai. The Creek was the location of the earliest settlements in the area and also played a seminal role in the history of the city, providing...