Speicherstadt

Hamburg built the Speicherstadt because it lost an argument. When the city finally entered the German customs union in 1881, it negotiated a duty-free zone in the port, and to fill it the old island quarters of Kehrwieder and Wandrahm were cleared — more than twenty thousand people were moved out so that coffee, tea, cocoa, spices and carpets could move in. From 1883 onward a district of warehouses rose on the islands in the Elbe, the first section opening in 1888, and building went on in stages until 1927. The result is roughly a kilometre and a half of red brick, 26 hectares of it, laid out along narrow canals called fleets.

The look was set by Carl Johann Christian Zimmermann, with the engineer Franz Andreas Meyer, and it is a strange and handsome mix: working storehouses dressed as Gothic castles, with stepped gables, turrets, pointed windows and glazed terracotta ornament picked out against the dark brick. Each block has two faces — a water side, where barges once came alongside and winches on the gables hoisted sacks straight up into the lofts, and a street side for carts. Everything stands on oak piles driven into the marshy ground, which is why the fleets and their tidal water are part of the structure rather than decoration. The best views are from the bridges at dusk, when the facades are lit and reflected in the canals; the little Wasserschloss of 1905–1907, once home and workshop of the men who maintained the warehouse winches, standing on a tongue of land where two fleets meet, is the picture most people come away with.

About half the district was destroyed in the bombing of 1943, and it was rebuilt carefully enough that by 1967 the ensemble read as a whole again. The free-port function faded away, and in 2015 UNESCO inscribed the Speicherstadt together with the neighbouring Kontorhaus district and its expressionist Chilehaus — a pairing of the warehouse and the office block that together tell the story of a trading port at its height. Carpet traders still kept many of the lofts into this century, and the district is known for having held a large share of the world's oriental rug stock.

Today the storehouses carry new cargo: the International Maritime Museum in Kaispeicher B, a customs museum, spice and coffee roasters, and Miniatur Wunderland, the giant model railway that fills several floors of one block. It is worth walking the district twice, once by day for the detail of the brick and once after dark.

Getting there

The Speicherstadt lies on the southern edge of central Hamburg, under a kilometre from the city centre, directly across the fleet from the old town. The nearest U-Bahn stations are Baumwall on line U3 and Meßberg on line U1, each a few minutes' walk away; from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof it is a short U-Bahn or bus ride. Hamburg Helmut Schmidt Airport (HAM) is about 10 km away and linked to the centre by S-Bahn.