Few place names signal wealth as immediately as Beverly Hills, the small city ringed by Los Angeles that built its identity on Hollywood money and luxury retail. The land was home to the Tongva people, who called the spring-fed site the gathering of the waters, and it later became a Mexican rancho and then lima-bean fields before a syndicate drilling for oil struck water instead and laid out a town. Beverly Hills was incorporated in 1914, two years after the Beverly Hills Hotel opened and began .....

Synonymous with wealth and luxury, Rodeo Drive is a short stretch of street in Beverly Hills lined with some of the most exclusive shops in the world. Its three central blocks, just off the boulevards of the city, hold the flagship boutiques of the great fashion houses and jewellers, and the name has become global shorthand for high-end shopping and the glamour of Southern California. The street rose to fame in the second half of the twentieth century as designers and luxury brands clustered al.....

George Gershwin played a sheep pasture's concert hall in 1936; the pasture became UCLA. Royce Hall at 340 Royce Drive is the defining building of the university's Westwood campus - one of the original four structures of 1929, its twin-towered Lombard Romanesque facade modelled on Milan's Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio by architects Allison and Allison. The building opened as the campus's main classroom block with an auditorium designed for speech rather than music, yet by the late 1930s Duke Ellingt.....

Stretching some twenty-two miles across the Los Angeles basin, Sunset Boulevard is one of the most storied streets in the world, a winding ribbon that runs from the edge of downtown all the way to the Pacific. Few roads carry as much cinematic baggage; its very name conjures Hollywood glamour, faded stars and the sprawling, sunlit geography of Southern California. The boulevard traces a remarkable cross-section of the city. Beginning near the old pueblo and the historic core, it passes through .....

The most celebrated stretch of the long Los Angeles boulevard is the Sunset Strip, a mile and a half of road running through West Hollywood that has been the city's nightlife heart for the better part of a century. Lined with clubs, bars, hotels and enormous billboards, the Strip is where much of the legend of Hollywood after dark was made, and it remains a magnet for music fans and night owls. Its reputation was forged in successive eras of entertainment. In the glamorous mid-century years it .....

Perched on a hilltop above the city and reached by its own driverless tram, the Getty Center is a museum and cultural campus as celebrated for its architecture and setting as for the art within. Opened in 1997 and clad in pale travertine stone and glass, the complex commands sweeping views across Los Angeles to the ocean and the mountains, and admission to it is free. The center was made possible by the vast endowment of the oil magnate J. Paul Getty, whose fortune funds one of the wealthiest a.....

Leonard Nimoy's name now lights a Westwood marquee that first glowed on Christmas Day 1940, when the UCLAN Theatre opened a block south of the campus whose initials it borrowed. The Nimoy, at 1262 Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles, is UCLA's flexible live-performance home, reborn from the historic Crest Theatre. The building's cinema century ran through many names - UCLAN, Crest, Majestic Crest, Bigfoot Crest - and its defining feature arrived in the late 1980s, when theater designer Joseph Mus.....