Living in Charlotte
The pages for people who are already here — what is within reach at the weekend, what to do when something practical comes up, and what the city is built out of.
Outdoors, most weekends
Charlotte's greenways: what they are and where they go
Mecklenburg County's greenways are not, strictly speaking, footpaths. The county classes them as linear parks and as…
/outdoors/greenways/Where to park for a greenway walk
Mecklenburg County's greenways are easy to reach on foot if you happen to live beside one, and surprisingly awkward if you do…
/outdoors/greenway-parking/Dog parks in and around Charlotte
Mecklenburg County flags fifteen parks as having a dog park. Nine have a Charlotte address; six are in the surrounding towns.…
/pets/Playgrounds, spraygrounds and water play
Mecklenburg County records a playground at 148 parks. Ten have a sprayground. This page lists all of them, from the county's own…
/families/playgrounds-and-water-play/Carolina Raptor Center, Huntersville
It started with one bird. In 1975 someone brought an injured broad-winged hawk to Dr Richard Brown, an ornithologist at UNC…
/outdoors/carolina-raptor-center/Practical things that come up
Parking in Charlotte
Most parking advice for Charlotte is a list of prices, and most of it is wrong by the time you read it. This page is about the…
/getting-around/parking/Accessible Charlotte
Everything on this page is what an organisation publishes about its own accessibility, quoted or closely paraphrased, dated, and…
/practical/accessibility/Sunday in Charlotte
This is not a list of what's on. Things that are on change; this page is about the things that don't.
/practical/sunday/Funerals, burial and end of life in Charlotte
If someone has just died and you are looking for what to do next, the practical section is first. The rest can wait.
/practical/funerals/Libraries in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library runs 23 locations across the county. A library card is the single most useful free thing a newcomer…
/living-here/libraries/Eating out here
Charlotte's social districts
A social district is a defined area where you may walk around outdoors with an open drink. It is not a general right, it is not…
/eat-and-drink/social-districts/Halal food in Charlotte: butchers, markets and how to check
Start with the thing most guides won't tell you: no halal certification body publishes a certified list covering Charlotte.
/eat-and-drink/halal/Alcohol-free Charlotte: where to go when you're not drinking
A city that markets itself on breweries can be a hard place to spend an evening if you don't drink — whether that's for faith…
/eat-and-drink/alcohol-free/Running something
Suppliers we recommend
These three are our own recommendations, chosen by the publisher of this guide — not the winners of a survey, an award, or a ranking. How we choose, and what the relationships are.
Charlotte-Print
A print counter in University City. Plan sets and blueprints, signage, business stationery and binding — quoted and proofed before anything goes on the press.
/services/printing/charlotte-print/Charlotte Mailbox
Private mailboxes with a street-style address rather than a PO Box number, from a staffed counter — held behind the counter or in a box you can open at any hour.
/services/mail/charlotte-mailbox/Charlotte Tech Repair
Board-level repair done on the premises rather than shipped to a depot, plus consoles, drones and devices most shops turn away.
/services/device-repair/charlotte-tech-repair/The city underneath the city
Brooklyn: the neighbourhood Charlotte demolished
If you stand in Charlotte's Second Ward today — among the government buildings, the car parks and Marshall Park — you are…
/history/brooklyn/How Charlotte's neighbourhoods were made
Most of what gets written about Charlotte's neighbourhoods is estate-agent copy. This page is built from a different kind of…
/neighbourhoods/how-they-were-made/Gold
Charlotte is a banking city. People tend to date that back to the 1980s, or to the mergers of the 1990s, and to treat it as a…
/history/gold/Charlotte's lost places
Getting a building onto the National Register of Historic Places is a long, careful, evidence-heavy process. It confers an…
/history/lost-places/Charlotte's historic cemeteries
Uptown Charlotte's largest public green space is a cemetery — and the way it was laid out tells you more about the city than most…
/history/cemeteries/Who designed Charlotte: the planned suburbs
Drive through Dilworth, Myers Park or Elizabeth and the streets curve where a developer working to a grid would have run them…
/history/planned-suburbs/Free, and worth doing twice
Free things to do in Charlotte
Charlotte is unusually good at this, mostly because the city and county own so much of what is worth seeing. This page is what we…
/free/Public art in Charlotte
Mecklenburg County's public art register lists 242 installations, and nearly all of them are publicly owned: 132 works belong to…
/culture/public-art/Charlotte on a rainy day
Charlotte gets proper rain, and it tends to arrive on the afternoon you had planned to be outside. Here is what is indoors, from…
/things-to-do/rainy-day/