Why Lusaka rewards slowing down

Lusaka is not a city you conquer in a checklist, and the visitors who try, racing between sights and measuring the place against capitals built for sightseeing, tend to leave underwhelmed, having moved too fast to notice that the city's value was never in its landmarks.

What Lusaka offers instead is a register, a way of spending time that the city quietly insists on. The good cafés are built for lingering rather than turnover; the markets reward wandering over efficiency; lunches are meant to stretch, and an afternoon given over to a single neighbourhood will tell you more than a day spent ticking off four. This is not a city that performs for the camera, and it does not hand its pleasures to the hurried; it gives them up slowly, to the person willing to sit somewhere long enough for the place to reveal what it is actually like.

This is also, frankly, the sensibility this imprint was built around. Our own home, Kuduberry Studios out along the Leopards Hill road, is the kind of unhurried, curated space the whole city does well when it is doing itself justice, somewhere to browse slowly, drink a coffee, and let the afternoon go where it wants. Lusaka, at its best, is a series of those rooms and gardens and corners, and the traveller who matches their pace to the city's rather than fighting it is the one who ends up reluctant to leave.

Helping you find that pace, and the specific places that hold it, is the whole intention behind the forthcoming Lusaka City Guide, a guide written for the unhurried rather than the rushed. It is on its way; see what's coming next and register your interest here.