Old Dubai on both banks of the Creek

You begin at the tip of old Dubai, on the spit of Shindagha where the creek meets the open Gulf. This was the ruler's quarter, and its low coral-stone houses have been rebuilt as one long museum along the bank. Water lies on two sides of you: the sea beyond Port Rashid to the west, the creek curling inland on the other. Beneath your feet runs the Shindagha Tunnel, opened in 1975 as the road under the creek mouth; before it, everything here went by boat. The walk keeps the creek beside you the whole way. Flat roofs, square wind towers and dhows moored just outside the doors tell you where you are.

Follow the waterfront for ten minutes with the creek at your shoulder. This bank is Bur Dubai, literally Dubai land, the mainland town that the water has always set apart from Deira opposite. Abras shuttle across the whole way, their engines the loudest sound on the quay, and Deira's towers stand in a row behind the moored dhows. Then the walkway slips under cover. The Textile Souk announces itself with very tall wooden arches carried on big metal pillars, a modern fix holding up an old idea, and bolts of silk, cotton and sari fabric stacked in the doorways on both sides. The arcade itself is the stop.

Leave the arcade on its inland side and pick up Ali bin Abi Talib Street for a few minutes, swapping the creek breeze for the hum of shops selling fabric, shoes and bangles. This corner of Bur Dubai is the Indian heart of the old city. Indian merchants were trading here by the nineteenth century, and in 1958 Sheikh Rashid allowed them a Hindu temple above the souk shops a few lanes from where you walk; since January 2024 only its Krishna shrine still operates, the Shiva shrine having moved to the new temple at Jebel Ali. The blocks are small, so the skyline opens suddenly. The Grand Mosque's minaret rises over the rooftops, and beside it a squat sand-coloured fort with a round corner tower and thick sloping walls. That fort is the museum.

Back to the water, then along the walkway east with the creek beside you. The lanes on the creek side look old but are not: this is Al Seef, finished by the developer Meraas in 2017, new buildings dressed in wind towers and palm-frond arish so convincingly that one architecture professor called it a historical fraud. The genuine article is a few steps inland, and the difference shows. The walkway bends away from the water and tightens into an alley you can touch both sides of; the plaster is pale and uneven, the doors are heavy wood, and above the roofline square wind towers stand in rows. When the lane opens into a courtyard between them, you are in Al Fahidi.

Two minutes of wandering, and it is all alleys now. Emiratis call these passages sikkas, and they were built this narrow for a reason: the walls shade each other through the afternoon, and the gap between them channels whatever breeze the wind towers overhead have not already caught. Sound drops away quickly; the main road is gone and you hear your own footsteps on the paving. Galleries, a tea house and small cafés have moved into some of the courtyard houses, but the plan of the quarter is unchanged. The Coffee Museum occupies one of them: a two-storey house whose doorway is signed in English and Arabic, with its own wind tower rising above the lane.

The Sheikh Mohammed Centre is barely a minute away through the same lanes, so take the slow way. In 1896 a fire swept along the creek and burned half the houses of Bur Dubai, most of them barasti huts of palm fronds; the coral-and-gypsum houses whose walls you are brushing past went up in the years that followed. Everything in these lanes has been lived in, abandoned and restored since, and the quiet you hear now is a recent luxury. Look up as you go; the wind towers are not decoration but the quarter's air-conditioning, and no two are quite alike. The centre is House 26, the number on its wall, a two-storey wind-tower house whose doorway opens straight onto a courtyard laid with carpets and low cushions.

Down to the creek again along Al Seef Street to the abra pier, then across the water. The crossing takes a few minutes and is the best view of the day: wind towers and dhows on one side, Deira's glass and concrete on the other, and the engines loud enough that nobody talks until the far bank. Deira owes its growth partly to this bank: in 1841 a smallpox epidemic broke out in Bur Dubai and drove families across the water to settle there, and the creek has been a two-town city ever since. The boat ties up at Al Sabkha station on the far bank, where a row of abras waits under a shaded pier, and that is Deira.

Ten minutes through old Deira, first along the quay past the moored dhows, then inland on Old Baladiya Street. Baladiya means municipality, and the name is literal: the building that housed Dubai Municipality's headquarters from 1957 to 1964 stands on this street in the heart of the old souk, and is now a small museum. It has lately been paved from end to end, closed to cars and given a new gate, and it strings the Gold, Perfume, Dates and Spice souks together in one walk. Then Spice Souk itself takes over, and the air changes before the signs do: open sacks of dried limes, strings of chillies and cinnamon bark at the shop doors.

Five minutes more, and the lanes have numbers instead of names until Sikkat Al Khail Road, which is wider, busier and lined with perfume shops. This is Al Ras, the Cape, one of the oldest communities in Deira: a pearl merchant, Sheikh Ahmed bin Dalmouk, founded Dubai's oldest known school here in 1912, and the quarter's trades have simply stayed put while the buildings around them changed. Sikkat Al Khail Road runs into the covered lane called Gold Souk, and the arrival is unmistakable: a long wooden-roofed arcade with windows full of gold from floor to ceiling, and the backlit signs the World Gold Council hung at every entrance in 2003 naming Dubai the City of Gold. You end in the thick of old Deira, with Al Ras metro a short walk away.