Map of Boston

COUTURE gowns, vintage jeans, bangles encrusted with moonstones and topaz, necklaces heavy with amber and jade. Venetian glass vases, Venezuelan wood carvings, Moroccan ceramics and mohair throws. Handbags in leather and pink suede, bath oils flavoured with ginger and lime, candles wafting scents of pumpkin and sage. Art Deco posters, original prints, oil-heavy canvases on pristine walls. Stand by your credit cards, folks, and welcome to Newbury Street, Boston.

If you’re thinking of a transatlantic shopping weekend, the place to splurge is supposedly New York. But Boston is nearer (taking half an hour less to fly to than New York), friendlier and far easier to get to know; after a long weekend here you’ll be old friends with a city that has been home to the English since 1624, four years after the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot on American soil at nearby Plymouth.

Within an hour of arriving in the city, my mum and I were sitting in a pavement café on Newbury Street, sipping perfectly chilled pinot grigio and trying to decide between crab cakes and clam chowder.

Boston is divided up with the normal precision of American cities; the north end is the Italian quarter, the financial district and downtown hold the foundations for the cluster of skyscrapers that define Boston’s skyline.

Chinatown and the theatre district are a little down-at-heel, but for us it was the Back Bay area, built on reclaimed land over 40 years, where we spent most of our time.

Our hotel, the Lenox, was perfectly positioned on Boylston Street, Boston’s main drag, just one block away from Newbury Street.

Out of our tenth-floor window, we had a mesmerising view of Boylston, stretching down to the towers of the financial district. Five hundred yards in the other direction lay Boston’s major shopping malls, Prudential Centre and Copley Square Plaza.

Amazingly, for such confirmed shoppers, we barely set foot in either of them. We stuck a toe in the Prudential Centre but it was like a hundred malls before it; crammed with shops and shoppers, great if you want to clothes-shop seriously, or get yourself a cut-price iPod.

But we wanted to stroll and potter, to browse among the brownstones, and so that first brief afternoon we ambled along Boylston, taking in the mishmash of architecture; Trinity Church, dating back to 1872, crouched next to John Hancock’s 62-storey skyscraper, across the street from the gothic Old South Church, complete with campanile.

We did a loop around the Boston Public Gardens, the oldest botanical gardens in the country, and watched as beaming brides were photographed beneath the autumn sunshine.

Then jet lag finally made us droop and we headed back to the hotel. By ten the next morning we were sipping spiced pumpkin coffee and jolting along Boston’s streets on a hop-on, hop-off trolley bus tour that took us across the Charles River to neighbouring Cambridge, home of Harvard University and MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), America’s vanguard of information technology and computer wizardry.

If you’re away on a weekend à deux, and you want to shop, MIT is a godsend; dispatch your bloke to the MIT museum for a day of playing with robots, while you indulge in a serious spree.

But Harvard Square itself, praised by most of the guidebooks as a boho-chic hang-out for Boston’s academics, was a disappointment; a scrappy, grubby triangle of streets that are certainly not worth the T-ride (Boston’s underground) from the centre of town. So instead, we hopped off the bus at Quincy Market, which was a forerunner of Covent Garden, where Boston’s original marketplace, Faneuil Hall, has been transformed into an open-air complex of eateries, boutiques and piazzas with free street theatre.

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