New York

Everyone does the High Line. Almost nobody does it at 7am in June, when the gardens are doing their best work — the grasses catching the early light, the wildflowers in full summer colour, the city below just starting to move. The park opens at 7am and for the first hour you'll share it with joggers, the occasional dog, and a handful of people who know. The section between 20th and 23rd Streets has the best plantings; the sun hits the Hudson from the western overlooks around 7:45. By 10am it's a river of tourists. You've already had the whole thing to yourself.

When June turns properly humid and the city feels like a wet blanket folded over your head, go to the New York Earth Room on Wooster Street in SoHo. A quiet loft. 250 cubic yards of actual soil. Walter De Maria put it there in 1977 and nobody has moved it since. The smell is extraordinary — cool and dark and completely wrong for where you are. It's free, air-conditioned in all the ways that matter, and takes about fifteen minutes. You will think about it for weeks. The Earth Room's cool, dark air is exactly what you'll need when the heat hits midday.

When the June heat comes down hard on Manhattan — and it does, and it will, with the particular savagery of a city where the buildings trap everything — the right move is Doyers Street in Chinatown, which is not only the best dim sum address in New York but also one of the most historically peculiar streets in America: a sharp bend originally known as the Bloody Angle that made it tactically useful to the tong gangs of the early 1900s and now makes it shaded, cool, and slightly separate from the noise. Nom Wah Tea Parlor has been open since 1920. Order the egg roll (not what you think — enormous, crackly, magnificent) and the shrimp and snow pea leaf dumplings. Arrive before noon on a Sunday and the neighbourhood around you is at full, glorious noise. Doyers Street's shade and cool air provide refuge from the serious midday heat in the low 30s.