A note on travel, as at 30 October 2026. Travel to Russia is not currently practicable from Britain. There are no direct flights and there cannot be, because UK law bars any aircraft flying to or from a Russian aerodrome from using UK airspace; the Finnish land border has been closed since December 2023, and the Helsinki rail and ferry links ended in 2022; cards issued outside Russia have not worked there since March 2022; cruise lines no longer call; and the Foreign Office advises against all travel to the whole of the country, specifically flagging a risk of detention for British nationals and a materially worse position for British-Russian dual nationals. That advice is advice rather than a prohibition, but it makes mainstream travel insurance unobtainable and consular help very limited. The institutions themselves are open. The pages below therefore describe the city, its buildings and its collections rather than how to visit them.
Founded as a fortress, in the middle of a war
The city dates from 27 May 1703, when the Peter and Paul Fortress was laid out on Hare Island in the Neva delta. What was founded that day was a military and naval position commanding the river and the approach from the Gulf of Finland, in the middle of the Great Northern War, on ground taken from Sweden weeks earlier. Older accounts describe a city founded and "devoted to culture and science", which is a later gloss: the Academy of Sciences dates from 1724 and the Kunstkamera, Russia's first public museum, opened in the following decade — consequences of the city existing rather than reasons for it.
Nor did Peter "decide to move the capital". No decree of transfer was ever issued. The tsar settled here, the court followed in 1712 and the institutions and foreign missions drifted across over the next two years. The status was then interrupted — Peter II took the court back to Moscow in 1728, and it returned in the early 1730s — and it ended when the capital went back to Moscow in March 1918, with German forces close by. Two hundred and four years in all.
Who built it, and the figure that will not stand up
Older accounts say that foreign architects and engineers were imported and that they built the city "using local labor". The first half is true; the second is a euphemism, and what it conceals is worth stating plainly.
For the first fifteen years the workforce was conscripted, not hired: peasant levies assessed on households across Russia and marched here, often under guard, in rotating shifts of two or three months. Annual quotas ran to thirty and then forty thousand and were never met — archival work puts the number actually mobilised at around twenty thousand a year. The men were paid, at a rouble a month with a bread ration. Conscription ended after 1717 and was replaced by a tax that paid for hired labour. Swedish prisoners of war are credited with cutting the line of Nevsky Prospekt in 1711.
On the death toll, the honest position runs in both directions. The familiar figure of a hundred thousand comes from Just Juel, a Danish envoy who first saw the city in late 1709 and was repeating hearsay; other foreign writers of the period gave figures up to three hundred thousand. Archival historians have scaled it down by roughly an order of magnitude: from a 1716 muster roll one study found a death rate under one per cent, and the fullest reconstruction puts the total workforce of 1703 to 1712 at some 227,000 and the deaths at between thirteen and eighteen thousand — an average of six to eight per cent, which was not extraordinary for the period. Excavations of eighteenth-century building sites in the 1950s found no mass graves, only refuse pits full of animal bones, which argues for meat in the rations. The defensible sentence is that conditions were lethal and that the deaths numbered in the low tens of thousands in the first decade, not a hundred thousand.
The nickname, and what it is worth
Older accounts lean heavily on the "Venice of the North" and on a "city of 101 islands". The island count belongs to the beginning of the nineteenth century and is dealt with among the bridges. As for the epithet, roughly thirty-eight places claim it — Amsterdam, Bruges, Stockholm, Hamburg, Gdańsk, Strasbourg, Manchester and Birmingham among them — and no origin or first use can be established for any of them, here included. It is a phrase rather than a fact.
A better-documented canal story attaches to Vasilyevsky Island, which Peter is said to have wanted built as a "little Amsterdam". There were no canals on it when he died: four were dug between 1727 and 1730, after his death, and Catherine II had them filled in in 1767.
The three names
- Sankt-Peterburg from 1703.
- Petrograd from August 1914, by decree of Nicholas II after Russia entered the First World War, to replace a German-sounding form.
- Leningrad from 26 January 1924, decided by the Second Congress of Soviets days after Lenin's death.
- Saint Petersburg again after a poll on 12 June 1991 — turnout about 65 per cent, with just under 55 per cent in favour — confirmed by decree on 6 September 1991. It was deliberately called a poll rather than a referendum, to avoid legal complications.
The surrounding region is still called Leningrad Oblast. Its deputies declined to rename it, and the name stands.
Scale, and the light
The city has about 5.6 million inhabitants on the most recent official estimate, which makes it the second largest in Russia and one of the largest in Europe. The long trend is worth more than the figure: a peak of around five million in 1990, a decline to about 4.6 million by 2003, and recovery since — though the apparent jump between the 2010 and 2021 censuses is a data event rather than a demographic one, the 2021 census having been widely criticised.
At a latitude of nearly 60° north it is the northernmost city in the world with over a million people, and that produces the white nights of late May to mid-July. One correction worth making, because popular accounts get it wrong in the other direction: there is no midnight sun here. The sun does set; at the solstice it goes only about six and a half degrees below the horizon, which is the threshold of civil twilight, so the sky never goes properly dark. The counterpart is a winter solstice with under six hours of daylight, and a year with roughly seventy-five sunny days in it.
The skyline, and a dispute now before UNESCO
The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1990. It is a serial property of unusual breadth, taking in not only the centre but the outlying palace ensembles at Peterhof, Tsarskoye Selo, Pavlovsk and Gatchina, Kronstadt and the Pulkovo observatory.
For nearly three centuries the tallest thing in the city was the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral. That ended with the Lakhta Center, 462 metres, which topped out in January 2018 and is the tallest building in Europe. Its predecessor, the Okhta Center, had been proposed opposite Smolny Cathedral and was abandoned there after the World Heritage Committee objected to a tower of that height in a horizontal, riverine landscape whose skyline had been protected since imperial times.
That argument is not history. In 2026 the Committee recorded that the completed tower has a negative impact on the site's value, that two further towers are proposed — 555 and 703 metres, mostly inside the inscribed property — that its advisers had recommended cancelling both, and that an advisory mission in January 2026 was denied access to the site. It urged the state party not to approve them and stated that building them would justify placing the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger. A further report is due in February 2027.
The weather, and the water
The climate is humid continental, and milder in winter than Russia generally because of the Baltic: an annual mean of about 6 °C, January around −5 °C, July around 19 °C, with some 660 millimetres of rain and about 1,600 hours of sunshine. Snow cover is stable for roughly four months. The records are the interesting part, because of how they are distributed: the highest is 37.1 °C, on 7 August 2010, and the lowest −35.9 °C, in January 1883. Nearly all the absolute minima belong to the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and nearly all the maxima to the twenty-first; 2020 was the warmest year on record.
Flooding has shaped the city more than frost. A flood is registered above 160 centimetres at the reference gauge, and there were 324 of them between 1703 and 2003. The record is 421 centimetres, on 19 November 1824, with several hundred dead — the flood of Pushkin's Bronze Horseman. Then 380 centimetres in 1924, and 239 in January 2005, which closed six metro stations.
The answer was a 25-kilometre dam across the Gulf of Finland, begun in 1979 and inaugurated on 12 August 2011; its gates were first closed against a surge that November. One neat consequence: the city's ring road was completed on the same day, because its western section runs as a six-lane causeway along the top of the dam.
St Isaac's Cathedral
Older accounts describe it as gold-encrusted, held up by some of the largest red granite columns in the world, under construction for over forty years, with mosaics around malachite and lapis lazuli columns, and large enough to hold fourteen thousand. Most of that survives checking; the last part does not.
- Auguste de Montferrand, 1818 to 1858 — forty years almost exactly, and he died about a month after the consecration.
- 112 monolithic granite columns in all, 48 of them in the porticoes at ground level, about 114 tonnes each, from the Pyterlahti quarry in Finland. They were raised on purpose-built timber scaffolding before the walls were built, which is the remarkable thing and is almost always left out.
- The iconostasis is framed by eight semiprecious columns — six malachite and two of lazurite. Older accounts have the mosaics surrounding the columns; it is the other way round, the columns being part of the iconostasis.
- The mosaics exist because the original oil paintings began deteriorating from damp and cold before the building was even consecrated, so Montferrand had them reproduced in smalt. The programme was never finished, and paintings and mosaics still coexist.
- The main dome carries over a hundred kilogrammes of gold, fire-gilded by a mercury-amalgam process that killed about sixty workers. Overall height 101.5 metres.
- The capacity figure has no reference source. Neither the city's encyclopaedia nor the standard national encyclopaedia gives one; fourteen thousand is travel copy inflated on top of travel copy, and it should not be repeated.
It is a state museum-monument in which services are also held, having resumed in 1991 and become regular from 2002. A proposal to transfer it to the Russian Orthodox Church, announced in January 2017, drew protests and legal challenges and simply lapsed at the end of 2018 without being formally reversed. The Foucault pendulum hung in the dome from Easter 1931 — demonstrated to some seven thousand spectators — until 1986, when fatigue in the fixings had it taken down and a dove restored in its place.
Three more that a short account cannot omit
- The Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral. The cathedral is by Domenico Trezzini, 1712 to 1733, and its spire of 122.5 metres was the tallest structure in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union from 1733 to 1952, and the tallest in the city until 2017. Almost every Russian sovereign from Peter I is buried in it, Peter II and Ivan VI excepted; Nicholas II and his family were reinterred there in July 1998.
- The Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, by Alfred Parland, 1883 to 1907, built on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881. It is the one building that argues with everything around it — a deliberate rejection of the classical city — and it carries several thousand square metres of mosaic. Closed in 1932, it served as a morgue during the siege and then as a vegetable store, which earned it the nickname Saviour on Potatoes; it reopened in August 1997 and has never been reconsecrated.
- Peterhof, where the fountains are the point. There are over a hundred and fifty of them and four cascades, and they have run for three centuries without pumps, on gravity alone: springs were located on the Ropsha heights in August 1720, the fountains first played in August 1721, and the conduit network now runs to some forty kilometres.
The Russian Museum, in Rossi's Mikhailovsky Palace beside the Mikhailovsky Garden, holds the national collection of Russian art, as against the imperial collection of European art in the Hermitage. The Mariinsky Theatre carries the performing arts in a city otherwise made of stone.
One last correction about the metro
Popular accounts describe a fast-growing network. It is not. There are five lines, and Gorny Institut, which opened in December 2024, was the first new station in five years — originally due in 2015, deferred repeatedly, and delayed again by a fatal scaffolding collapse in 2020. Two more opened at the end of that year as the first section of a new line, and a further seven are under construction against a commitment to open ten by 2030. The honest statement is that expansion here has been slow and repeatedly put back, which is the opposite of what is usually said.