Every design for Berlin

Berlin grew up along the banks of the Spree, which winds west until it meets the Havel in Spandau, and the whole city sits inside Brandenburg like an island of its own. It is Germany's capital and largest city, a city-state of twelve boroughs, and a place the world knows for its music, its architecture, its festivals and a nightlife that keeps going long after other cities have gone to bed.

The Brandenburger Tor is the image everyone carries home, but the city's identity is written just as clearly elsewhere. The Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer keeps a stretch of the border in place, the Tränenpalast remembers the goodbyes said at the crossing, and the Oberbaumbrücke now carries people across the Spree where East and West were once kept apart. Further in, the Altes Museum and the Alte Nationalgalerie show the calmer, classical side of a capital that has reinvented itself more than once.

Prussia, the German Empire, a divided city, a reunited capital: Berlin has been all of these, and it still feels like a place in the making. If you have lived here, you know which bridge is yours, which lake you swim in and which corner the map should be centred on – and you can take it with you wherever you go next.