Žižkov

What it is

Praha 3, the old working-class quarter east of the centre, named after Jan Žižka, the one-eyed Hussite general who won his battle on Vítkov hill here in 1420. Between the wars it was „red Žižkov", proud, poor and left-wing, and it has kept the attitude: this is still the roughest-edged and cheapest of the inner districts, gentrifying street by street from the Vinohrady side.

What is here

The Žižkov Television Tower, 216 metres of late-communist rocket architecture finished in 1992, with David Černý's faceless babies crawling up its pillars and an observation deck with the best high view in the city. On Vítkov ridge, the National Monument — a vast functionalist slab of state memory — fronted by the equestrian statue of Žižka, among the largest bronze horsemen in the world, with a free panorama from the terrace below it. The Olšany Cemeteries, the largest in Prague, hold Jan Palach's grave; Franz Kafka is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery at Želivského. Parukářka hill has a beer garden shack and a view the tourists have not found.

What it is like

Pub Prague. Žižkov's claim to more pubs per head than anywhere else is unverifiable and entirely believable — corner drinking establishments every hundred metres, many charging prices the centre abandoned a decade ago. Nightlife is local, scruffy and friendly rather than curated. The streets are steep, the façades are half renovated and half peeling, and the mix of old regulars and young arrivals is the district's actual character.

Practical

The core has no metro — that is why it stayed cheap. Trams 5, 9, 15 and 26 do the work, and line A stations (Jiřího z Poděbrad, Flora, Želivského) sit along the southern edge. Staying here costs the least of any walkable district: the centre is twenty-odd minutes on foot or a short tram ride. Check the gradient of your street before booking — parts of Žižkov are genuinely steep — and expect character over polish from the cheaper hotels.