Laid out in the 1920s, Westwood is one of the few places in LA designed with the pedestrian in mind. The Italianate buildings of this would-be Mediterranean shopping village, how­ever, hold only a routine collection of book, clothing and souvenir shops. Most people who come to Westwood are film buffs making for its cinemas, which show new releases long before they reach the rest of the world, or are among the 25,000 students enrolled at the nearby University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

A more deserving place than Westwood for an hour’s stroll is UCLA, whose roots stretch back to 1881 though the oldest campus buildings are attractive Romanesque structures dating from the 1920s. Places of note include the characterful Powell Library (http://www.library.ucla.edu/powell), the Fowler Museum (http://www.fowler.ucla.edu) with its exhibitions of folk art and the contemporary art and sculpture shows of the Wright Art Gallery. Much more art can be found on the edge of Westwood at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Centre (https://hammer.ucla.edu), 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, which displays the multi-million dollar collection of the late oil magnate Packed with the leading names of European art and devoting a special gallery to the Codex Hammer – a collection of pages from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci – the museum is surprisingly underwhelming, largely due to its lack of single great works. The temporary exhibitions, on the other hand, can be exceptional.

Detour – California Institute of Technology

The Huntington Library and Gardens are a major draw on Pasadena’s outskirts, but scientifically-minded visitors with time to spare will be better served by a visit to the California Institute of Technology. The Institute, better known as CalTec is a small, independently-run university but one with such phenomenal resources that it can attract the nation’s leading scientific minds. Twenty-one Nobel Prize winners have been based here, and CalTec is the home of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the means to carry NASA astronauts into space and to the moon were devised during the 1960s. Tours are offered by the website, click here to find out more (http://www.caltech.edu.)