Perhaps my favourite place in Moscow – and it’s a city I really love – is St Basil’s Cathedral, mostly because the quirky, colourful towers don’t seem like they could be real – yet there they stand, just at the end of Red Square and close to the Kremlin. They make Moscow a bit more magical and mystical and I think that’s a good thing.

St Basil’s Cathedral, which is known locally as Pokrovsky Sobor, was built on the orders of Ivan the Terrible in the mid-sixteenth century; the urban legend is that he then demanded that the architect responsible be blinded so he could never build anything similar, but there are actually no facts to back this story up.

The first time I went to Moscow, I didn’t go inside St Basil’s – I was on such a budget that I just took pictures from the outside. On my second trip I toured the inside and it really was interesting, but a big part of the magic comes from staring at it from the outside.

Like most parts of Russia, the whole tourist information thing is a bit underdeveloped; if you can read a bit of Russian there’s a website with some basic details – for example, that it’s open between 11am and 6pm and it looks like current entry fees are 100 rubles. You can also try this webcam site – at the moment, it’s looking quite subdued with a snowy dusting.

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