Open midJune to July. Sodennalms Husvagncamping («0843 91 18). Close to Eriksdalsbadet swimming pool and for campervans only. Open midJune to July with a maximum stay of two nights. Angby («0837 04 20), Thana line #17 or #18 to Angbyplan. West of the city and near a beach. Open JuneAug. The City Seeing the sights is a straightforward business in Stockholm: everything is easy to get to, opening hours are long, the city pleasant and presentable. And though the sights and museums have changed, visitors have noted Stockholm's aesthetic qualities for 150 years. Once, in the centre, there were country lanes, great orchards, grazing cows, even windmills. The downside then was no pavements (until the 1840s) and no water system (until 1858), open sewers, squalid streets and crowded slums. But Stockholm today is one of Europe's brightest, cleanest, most sanitary cities, with a waterfront skyline that has few equals. Yet, apart from the spruced up old town, which is getting more chic and pricey each year, the city has little soul. Unless you're very much into museums (of which there's an indiscriminate abundance), Stockholm's fabled beauty palls after a few days spent tramping past expensive shops and restaurants. It's all been a bit too much for the city's middleclass bratpack, and dozens are arrested every summer for livening things up with a spot of window smashing in central Norrmalm. More shockingly, though, for all Swedes, a Norrmalm street saw the murder of their prime minister, Olof Palme, in 1986. Old Stockholm: Gamla Stan and Riddarholmen Three islands make up Old Stockholm Riddarholmen, Staden and Helgeandsholmen the whole historyriddled mass a clutter of seventeenth and eighteenthcentury Renaissance buildings backed by hairline medieval alleys. Here, on the three adjoining polyps of land, Birger Jarl erected the first fortifications in 1255, and for centuries this was the city of Stockholm. Although, strictly speaking, only the largest island, Staden, contains Gamla Stan (the old town), it's a name that is usually attached to the buildings and streets of all three islands. Once Stockholm's working centre, nowadays Gamla Stan is primarily a tourist city, an eminently strollable concentration of royal palace, parliament and cathedral, and one that represents an extraordinary tableau of cultural history. ТЪе central spider's web, especially if you approach it across Norrbro or Riksbron, invokes potent images of the past: sprawling monumental buildings and high, шгу churches form a protective girdle around the narrow streets. The tall, dark houses in the centre were mostly those of wealthy merchants, still picked out today by intricate doorways and portals bearing coats of arms. Some of the alleys in between are the skinniest thoroughfares possible, steeply stepped between battered walls; others are dead ends, covered P®®®® ways Unking leaning buildings. It's easy to spend hours wandering around her although the atmosphere these days is not so much medieval as mercenary fiVv I.