The Lodberries are stone merchants' houses built out into the sea, so that boats could once unload straight into the storerooms below. They stand at the south end of the waterfront, and in the BBC's Shetland one of them serves as the home of detective Jimmy Perez. The old lanes climb the hill behind them, and the whole town arranges itself along the sheltered water, with the island of Bressay across the sound holding off the North Sea.
Commercial Street, known locally as Da Street, is the flagstoned main lane that runs along the harbour. It is lined with independent shops, cafés and old merchants' buildings, and it is the centre of the Shetland Craft Trail. This is Fair Isle knitwear country, and the patterns turn up in shop windows and, more thoroughly, in the Shetland Museum & Archives at Hay's Dock, a short walk north. The museum is free, has a boat hall with floating exhibits and a café, and covers the maritime, fishing and whaling history that made the place.
Next door to the museum is Mareel, the arts centre on the waterfront at North Ness. It holds a 250-seat auditorium, two cinema screens and a café bar looking out over the water. It opened in 2012, built in part to replace the town's live-music venues that had closed one by one through the 1990s and 2000s. The name is the Shetland word for phosphorescence on the sea. For seafood, Fjarå Café Bar sits on the shore and is known for regional cooking, and around Commercial Street the town's pubs and bars keep going — the Lounge Bar is the one people name for its traditional fiddle sessions.
Fort Charlotte stands on the waterfront in the middle of it all. It was first built in the 1650s, rebuilt to Robert Mylne's design in 1665, and, in the words of one account, "held off a Dutch fleet in 1667 which thought it was far more heavily manned" than it was. It has since been a jail, a courthouse, a custom house and a coastguard station, and it is now the headquarters of an Army Reserve battery.
From the fort you can walk the Knab, a coastal route round the headland past the Lodberries with the sea on one side. In the other direction, Clickimin Broch sits on the shore of its loch within walking distance of the centre — an Iron Age tower begun as early as 400 BC, with a rare free-standing blockhouse just inside the entrance.
Lerwick itself is young by Shetland standards, founded in the seventeenth century as a herring and white-fish port trading with the Dutch fleet. The early settlement was twice burned, once by Scalloway residents who objected to its "immoral and drunken activities." It became the capital in 1708.
There is no railway; Shetland has none. Sumburgh Airport lies about 25 miles south, and NorthLink Ferries run overnight to Aberdeen. On the last Tuesday of January, up to a thousand costumed guizers march the town by torchlight and burn a replica Viking longship, and the winter dark makes room for the fire.