Newbury Street starts at Arlington Street, right next to Burberrys' and the Taj Hotel, and the shoppers' and strollers' delights continue westward for half a dozen blocks.

Streets in the Back Bay were laid out in a grid. Cross streets running north-south were given names with initial letters running from A to H: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, and so on, so it's easy to know how far you are from the start of Newbury Street at Arlington Street.

Shops sell everything from the sublime (and expensive) to the ridiculous (and expensive). Galleries can be chic or somewhat traditional. Cafés are good and bad, expensive and cheap, and all possible permutations of those four qualities.

Serious shoppers and gallery goers should pick up two useful brochures, available at information booths (City Hall, Boston Common Visitors Information Center, Boston Public Library) entitled The Newbury Street League Map, which gives a list of most of the shops and some of the cafes along the street, their specialties, addresses, and phone numbers. Also pick up the Map of the Newbury Street Art Galleries, which gives brief descriptions of the 30 galleries on the street, times of operation, special services, and so forth.

Newbury Street starts at the Taj, and the shops in the first few blocks are, naturally, the most expensive.

Emmanuel Church, just west of the Taj in the same block, lends a cool note of English Gothic and ivy to the polished-brass-and-marble of some of the shops. The church sponsors a variety of musical and theatrical programs—jazz, chamber music, choral recitals, puppet shows—and advertises current offerings on a wooden signboard in the side doorway.

The second cross street, then, is Berkeley, and in the block between Berkeley and Clarendon has more Gothic church architecture, this time in the form of the Church of the Covenant (Presbyterian), a bit plainer than the nearby Emmanuel. Organ recitals are held regularly at the Church of the Covenant, and usually a sign in the glass case will give the time.

All of the shops mentioned below are along the first six blocks or so of Newbury Street, starting at Arlington.

If you're shopping for —, look for big names such as Burberry's, Brooks Brothers, Bonwit Teller (in the old Boston Museum of Natural History Building), Cartier, Giorgio Armani, Ann Taylor, Laura Ashley and Guy Laroche, as well as Boston-based designers Charles Sumner, Louis-Boston, and Robert Todd.

—by Tom Brosnahan

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