The views from the glass-floored Observatory deck on the 100th floor of the Shanghai World Financial Centre are fantastic, but if the tour group queues stretch longer than your patience, duck around the corner to the Park Hyatt hotel entrance. Head up to the 79th floor lobby where, without the discomforts of the crowds, you can enjoy a similar high-rise perspective over Shanghai. Here, however, you can also enjoy a cappuccino in the classy The Living Room cafe.

The long drawn out reconstruction of the Bund is due for completion in April 2010, removing much of the traffic into an underground tunnel, and replacing the multiple car lanes with a park, widened riverside walkway and new restaurants and cafes. The area behind the Bund is also undergoing urban renewal, however there are some remarkable architectural gems from the early 20th century to be spotted. Starting at Suzhou Creek (where you'll find the excellent new Rockbund Art Museum, occupying a restored historic building two blocks back from the Bund) and heading along Huqiu Road and Jiangxi Road to Fuzhou Road, you'll find scores of semi-hidden 1920s and '30s former banks and administrative buildings. You can almost catch a whiff of the old opium dens that lined this grittily atmospheric part of town.

Love it or hate it, the Oriental Pearl Tower is a city symbol, even if it is long since been usurped as the city's highest vantage point. But the Tower's basement Shanghai history museum, offers an entertaining, interactive display of the history of modern Shanghai, including recreations of cobble-stoned Shanghai streets, a real Opium Wars gun and the original lions that sat in front of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank on the Bund.

Shanghai has no shortage of luxury malls and dodgy fake markets. Much more intriguing, and legal, is the new-generation 'Made in China' brands being developed by resident international and local design talents. On Taikang Lu, check out Nest (an eco-design collective spanning furniture, fashion and homewares) and Shokay (stylish knits made from soft Tibetan yak fleece). Elsewhere in the former French Concession, Madame Mao's Dowry (tel: +86 21 5403 3551) has a selection of China-chic mementos, and Platane is a souvenir-hunters dream, with artsy home accessories, porcelain tablewear and assorted other stuff to ease the RMB from your pocket.