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I go to Zurich because it is everything that most big cities are not. It is Ariel to London’s Caliban. Where summer in West London is a brute slave to fickle fashion’s Prospero, Zurich has the spirit of air beside water. All is in order there, and everything is just as it should be, much to the chagrin of most Zürchers, many of whom would relish a little moral turpitude, just as long as the trams went on running on time.

For everyone else who lives with a creeping sense of being part of urban chaos Zurich is the answer. It is a place of light and space with public transport that provides it citizens with a system that seems to be running on some divine timetable, drawn up purely for love of citizenship. Even though it is the financial capital and Switzerland’s largest city it still has a population of only 360,000, that’s a great deal lower than say Nottingham, that Midlands peach clocking in at about half a million. And yet Zurich is one of the most underrated cities, a place almost solely associated with the anonymous grey banking façade afforded by the nation’s neutrality, and for its once secret vaults, apparently the only thing that gave the Swiss a bit of a wicked edge. Zürchers roll their eyes at their own squeaky cleanliness in an environment where James Joyce noted that you could eat Minestrone off the pavement in Banhofstrasse, so pristine is this, the epicentre of the city’s economic heart. But how lacking in imagination it would be to just write Zurich off as a place of vaults and chocolate, though naturally there will be recourse to the latter.

At the time when London sweats in its own unconditioned summer fug Zurich becomes a long week-end haven, a short plane ride away: a morning flight, unpacked and out in time for lunch by the lake looking out over water so clear and clean a local I know swears that everyone drinks it. The rest of the day can easily be spend by the water, and an evening too, unless of course you are up for something a bit more sparkly.

There are Zürchers who claim that the city is dead by night, that nothing happens, and that they are all drearily in bed by 10pm, craving the fleshpots of Paris and Berlin, but the Neiderdorf area of the city, the oldest part of town, only begins to kick in as darkness descends. This is a place of narrow interweaving, Gothic streets shop-front-to-shop-front in film-set rows of bakeries, delicatessens, antique and book shops; a neighbourhood where old timer residents mix with the new crowd, the latter dictating that this is now the ‘in’ district. Dörfli, as the locals call this part of town, is also the oldest entertainment part of the city and, as the shopping day winds up this is where you will see the city’s real butterfly parade: spangly go go dancers and sinewy prostitutes, drinking coffee in bars and cafés, cranking and caffeinating themselves-up for the night ahead. As you wander among the display of flesh you also get a flexing of vocal chords, cartoon sound as well as vision: yodelling, jazz and heavy metal, all in the space of a hundred strides. So, most Zürchers will probably tell you to go and eat somewhere there in the evenings, among the newest joints and the buzz.

But that is not really the point. We are here to retreat, drawn towards the parts of the city that so many locals find to be relentlessly quiet. And so we come to the summer gem, the lidos of Zurich, the elegant bathing areas around the lake’s shore and clear, clean waters, where you can go and pass the whole day, from an early morning bathe and breakfast, to the last swim of the day when the band begins to play as you dry off in the last of the warmth.

With their native attention to detail Zürchers are hardly going to let their lidos be simply just swimming places. By day they have yoga, massage, art exhibitions, barbecues, café life, and at night they morph in to jazz bars, open-air cinemas, restaurants, even nightclubs. At the moment there are two that lead the field among the city’s dozen or so good lidos. Oberer Letten is not actually on the lake but on the riverside, right in the throb of the city. Trains, trams and people go by in their busy-being-busy way whilst you glide down 400 metres of river, past sun decks and volley ball pitches, the buildings of the city rising up all around. At night the lido becomes Pier West, a very hip bar, and an Asiatic tapas restaurant and double screen film arena, Primitivo, on the left bank. Lido number one though is probably Seebad Enge, floating right out into the lake, the project of some young architects who have updated the lido concept, taking it to a new level that means that it is not only all day and into the night, but also all year round, transforming into a huge sauna area in the winter. And lest you were wondering, most of the lidos are divided during the day into male and female swimming areas, fusing together as night draws in and the band begins to play. There are even ladies only lidos, but then this is Zürich, a city that also boasts a hotel near the lake called Ladies First, originally just for the ladies, though men are allowed in now, as long as they are very good and do everything that the ladies say.

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Just as Zurich has its own version of Schwyzerdütsch, Züridütsch, so it also has its own über-chocolate: Sprüngli, (main shop Banhofstrasse 21 tel + 41 44 224 46 15) with as many varieties of praline as the city has tram stops. Its signature Luxemburgerli are tiny fluffy cream-filled biscuits that go down the little red lane by the baker’s dozen, almost without being noticed at all. Choccy rival Teuscher (Storchengasse 9 tel: + 41 44 211 51 53) puffs it dribble-making aromas out onto the street to draw you into this den of nougats and cocoa. At the end of a brutal day’s retailing on Banhofstrasse it is almost a survival technique to scamper up to Sprüngli’s first floor café, or to salivate among the shelves of chocs at Café Schober (Napfgasse 4 tel: + 41 44 251 80 60). This miniaturised setting has been an integral part of the city since 1836, and though now part of the Teuscher choc-empire, it has not changed. The cakes, patisseries and chocolates are still laid out on wooden tables, and though the café is dolly–sized it still manages to serve about 2,000 people a day, all of them at a oddly leisurely-seeming pace. James Joyce liked to sip here, when he wasn’t licking Minestrone off Banhofstrasse, as did Lenin, though apparently he failed to pay the bill. Now there’s the beginning of a character-weakness that went from bad to worse.

Lido-wise, Oberer Letten is open from mid-May to mid-September, Lettensteg 10, 8037 Zurich. www.zuerich.com (under lido section) tel: + 41 44 362 92 00, swimming at Seebad Enge is also open from mid-May to mid-September with slightly varying opening times for the men’s and women’s swimming sections. The sauna kicks in during the winter. www.tonttu.ch tel: + 41 44 201 38 89.

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