The best places to see Sri Lanka's British colonial heritage

Colombo's Fort district is the heart of British Ceylon. The Old Parliament, now the Presidential Secretariat, the Grand Oriental Hotel, Cargills department store and the clock tower lighthouse line its streets. The Galle Face Hotel, opened in 1864, still faces the sea at the end of Galle Face Green.

Cinnamon Gardens, south of the centre, has wide avenues, the Town Hall modelled on the Capitol in Washington, the National Museum in a nineteenth-century building and Viharamahadevi Park, formerly Victoria Park.

A walk through Fort early in the morning, with a guide who knows the buildings, is the best introduction.

Mount Lavinia, south of the city, grew around a governor's seaside residence built in the early nineteenth century, now the Mount Lavinia Hotel. Its terrace above the beach is a classic place for a sundowner and a reminder of how colonial leisure shaped the coast.

Kandy was the last kingdom to fall to the British, in 1815. The Kandyan Convention, signed that year, handed the kingdom to the British Crown. Around the Temple of the Tooth, the British built offices, churches and the Queen's Hotel, which still overlooks the lake.

The British Garrison Cemetery, behind the temple, is a small, quiet place where soldiers, planters and their families were buried in the nineteenth century, often young, from disease and accident. Its caretakers tell their stories well.

St Paul's Church, beside the temple, was the garrison church.

Nuwara Eliya was developed by the British in the nineteenth century as a cool retreat, and it still has the feel of an English country town: a racecourse, a golf course, the Hill Club, the red-brick post office, the Grand Hotel and Holy Trinity Church. Gregory Lake was created by a British governor.

The tea industry, started in the 1860s after coffee failed, transformed the hills. Estate bungalows, some now hotels, and tea factories with their tall windowed buildings are everywhere between Hatton and Haputale. Adisham, near Haputale, is a stone country house built by a British planter and now a monastery.

The hill railway, with the Demodara loop and the Nine Arch Bridge near Ella, is one of the great engineering legacies. Tamil workers brought from South India built and worked much of this landscape, and their descendants remain the backbone of the tea estates.

Trincomalee was a key British naval base. Fort Frederick, originally Portuguese and Dutch, was garrisoned by the British, and the Commonwealth War Cemetery holds graves from the Second World War, when the harbour was attacked in 1942. The cemetery is beautifully kept and moving.

In Hambantota, a small Martello tower built in the early nineteenth century overlooks the sea. Galle, though famous for its Dutch fort, also has British-era buildings and the lighthouse.

Lankan Stays & Trails can arrange heritage-focused guides who explain both sides of the colonial story, from the grand buildings to the lives of plantation workers.

The British left railways, roads, schools and the tea industry, but also plantation systems, social divisions and the displacement of communities. Visiting estate villages, talking to guides and reading about the period gives a fuller picture than the hotels alone.

Many colonial buildings are now government offices, schools or hotels. Some can be entered; others are seen from outside. A guided walk adds context and stories that plaques do not.