Walk out of the modern Chantry Place shopping centre - air-conditioned, full of John Lewis and Marks and Spencer - and within five minutes you are on cobbles, looking up at jettied Tudor timbers along Elm Hill or staring through the wrought iron gates of the cathedral close. That collision is the point. Norwich is one of Britain's smaller cities (the 41st most populous, despite its medieval prestige), and it has the practical advantage that the historic core has not been pushed to the edge by a sprawling modern center. You can be on London Street - reportedly England's first pedestrianized shopping street - and have St Peter Mancroft's tower in your peripheral vision and the open-air market under its riot of primary-colored stall roofs filling the square below. The market has over 150 stalls and is, by area, the largest permanent outdoor market in Europe.

The Anglican Cathedral, begun in 1096 under Norman bishops, rises in pale Caen stone above the river and the cathedral close, with the second-tallest spire in England at 96 meters. The Catholic cathedral of St John the Baptist, much younger - a late Victorian gift from a single wealthy patron - sits up on Earlham Road as a high-Gothic Revival pile that locals call the smaller cathedral but that is by no means small. Between the two, on its raised mound in the middle of the city, stands Norwich Castle, the great Norman keep that William the Conqueror's son began and that for centuries was the county jail and the place from which Robert Kett, leader of the 1549 rising, was hanged in chains. The castle is now a museum. The mound has views across to both cathedrals. Add the surviving medieval lanes - Tombland, Princes Street, the Norwich Lanes around Upper Goat Lane and St Benedict's - and the city's older skeleton is still doing the work of organizing the day.

There is an old Norwich boast that the city once had a church for every week in the year and a pub for every day of the year. Whether or not that ever was literally true, the density of medieval churches around the city center is genuinely startling - St John Maddermarket, St Peter Mancroft, St Stephens, St Peter Hungate, St Andrew's Hall, and many more, often locked, sometimes converted, occasionally still functioning. The pub claim is less easily verified but the survival rate is still high. The Fat Cat is the only UK pub to have twice won CAMRA's National Pub of the Year award, serving over 25 real ales. The Adam & Eve is one of the oldest pubs in the country. Woodforde's Wherry is the local ale of choice, brewed just outside town. Then there are the things visitors should not say. People here are tired of being told they are 'normal for Norfolk' or being asked about Alan Partridge - both jokes were old decades ago, both are still played out by tourists, and both will earn at best a tight smile.

The University of East Anglia was founded in the 1960s, and Norwich University of the Arts followed in 2013, upgrading the much older College of Art and Design. Together they have given Norwich a constantly refreshed population of young people who keep arriving as 18-year-olds, deciding they like it here, and not leaving. The result is a city with a strong tradition of political radicalism - going back through Kett to the medieval guild risings - and a left-leaning, culturally curious present. UEA's literary creative writing program, run for decades, has produced an unusual number of Booker-nominated and Booker-winning novelists. The National Centre for Writing operates out of Dragon Hall down by the river. Both Aviva, the insurer, and the broker Marsh have major offices here. Norwich City FC, the Canaries, yo-yo between the top two divisions of English football and have their home at Carrow Road by the river. The city manages to feel like a modern place, a small bucolic town, and a medieval capital simultaneously, all without any one of those identities being put on for show.

Norwich is also a gateway. The Norfolk Broads - the network of navigable rivers, lakes and marshes - begin just east of the city, where the Wensum runs into the Yare. You can take a boat from town. North Norfolk's coastline is roughly 35 miles north, with the seal colonies at Blakeney and the high-cliffed beaches at Cromer. Great Yarmouth is east on the coast. Aylsham and the heritage steam railway lie north. The Marriott's Way footpath leaves town through Drayton and Attlebridge along the bed of a former railway. Norwich International Airport - sitting on what was RAF Horsham St Faith during the war, with the runways the Eighth Air Force flew B-24s from - is 3 nm north of the city and handles regional flights. Trains from Norwich reach London Liverpool Street in under two hours.