I have photos of the ruins of St. Nicholas’s Church, but these two tablets on the ruined wall are particularly interesting.
The top tablet marks the names of those members of the church’s congregation who were killed in 1915. I assume that there were more tablets in the church which are sadly no longer in existence.
Photos from the ruins of St Nicholas’s Church. The ruins have been left in this state to mark the horrors of war, with the only sections preserved being the tower and the crypts.
This glorious church was the tallest building in the world between 1874 and 1876 and it still remains the fifth tallest church in the world today. Unfortunately, other than the tower, the church was mostly destroyed during allied bombing of the city in 1943. Disappointingly, it could have been repaired after the Second World War as enough was left standing, but a decision was made to knock down most of what remained in 1951.
There are several parts of the church which remain today, some of the walls, some memorials and also the crypt which is now a museum. More of those in other posts…
There’s an elevator to the top of the tower and it’s fast and efficient, allowing visitors to get to just over 75 metres. The tower itself though is taller, topping out at 147 metres high. The sides are made of glass, so there are some good views of the tower’s interior when going up and down in the lift.
The elevator holds around eight people, although it wasn’t particularly busy when I visited. There’s a charge of €5, which includes admission to the museum, which was reduced for me as I had purchased the Hamburg Card.
The River Elbe and the Rathaus.
The Rathaus dominates the background.
Other views of the city centre, including the docks and old town areas. I’m not entirely sure that the whole elevator structure fits entirely well into the church, but if it brings money and people into the building then that’s a positive element.
With absolutely no discredit to the tourist information office for kindly providing English translations, I’m still puzzled as to what was meant here.
Ah, since posting this, I’ve seen the same in German but with the English translation “privacy please”. Which makes sense, give space to the customers in front 🙂
There was a project planned in the 1970s to build a new subway line in Hamburg. The line would have gone from City Nord to Uhlenhors, via the city centre.
Some of the work was completed, including at Hauptbahnhof Nord, where today the planned tunnel entrance is still visible. However, the German economy was struggling a little at the time and so the project was cancelled.
I don’t know why I’ve never seen these yoghurt based Fruitmania sweets from Haribo before, but I will certainly look out for them in the future. I’m fairly sure they’re not widely sold in the UK, but they should be, they do taste like yoghurt. And since they’re Haribo, and that means they’re healthy, with the flavours being cherry, blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, apricot and peach passion fruit.
How very lovely.
Hamburg Hauptbahnhof is the second busiest railway station in Europe, second only to Gare du Nord in Paris. In rather a strategic move to integrate services in the early part of the twentieth century, this station was opened in 1906 to replace a number of other stations in Hamburg.
That’s a lot of trains, including a double decker train for Dylan. There are no shortage of trains either to look at, with nearly 1,000 S-Bahn trains using the station every day and nearly 750 long and short distance trains also using the building. The building was badly damaged during the allied bombing of the city during the Second World War, but it still has the look of an early twentieth century railway station.
This is the entrance to the Wandelhalle shopping centre, which is part of the railway building.
Plenty of food options in the shopping centre and there is also an office of the city’s tourist information located here. I only got a subway train from the railway station, but it was all well signed and I got the impression that it was an organised and well run station.
The public transport system in Hamburg is mostly integrated under one ticket, including the trains, buses, rapid transit, underground and also the ferries. Since my daily public transport ticket, which costs just over £5, included the ferries I decided I might as well get on a ferry to have a little cruise around the harbour area.
The photo above is of the ferry after I had got off, it’s quite a large affair and there’s a downstairs and upstairs seating area. Ticketing on the Hamburg public transport system is on a honesty based system, so everyone is expected to have a ticket and there are no checks on boarding or departing. I’m sure that there are also frequent spot checks, but this strategy did make for a smoother boarding process.
The service that I went for was ferry service 62 and it takes around 35 minutes to get to its final destination of Finkenwerder, and there are several stops along the way. I didn’t get off the ferry until nearly back into the city centre, so my cruise lasted for just over an hour. A fair number of passengers didn’t get off either, so many were just using this as a cheap way of seeing the harbour area.
Below are some photos of the trip and it was pleasant to get some fresh air given just how hot it is in Hamburg.
I was in the fish market area of the city where there are numerous seafood restaurants and so I managed to decide that this would be a highly suitable location to instead have a Thai meal…..
I’m not normally one for sitting outside, it’s usually too hot and there are random insects that come and attack me. But, when in Hamburg do as the people of Hamburg do…..
Singha, which is effectively the national beer of Thailand, which was nicely presented and, given the current heat in Hamburg, at the very appropriate chilled temperature. On that note, I hope it’s not this hot all week.
On to the matter of the service at the restaurant, which was attentive and friendly. The server appeared to be the manager, or at least if not they had a very attentive and interested staff member, who was able to serve all the tables efficiently and in an engaging manner. She spoke perfect English, which aided the ordering process somewhat, and was ever helpful.
This is the lunch-time chicken green curry. There were ingredients in that I didn’t recognise, so it wasn’t quite like any Thai green curry that I’ve had before. However, the taste was exceptional and there was a depth of flavour and spice to the sauce. The vegetables retained some bite and the chicken was tender and had taken on the taste of the sauce. The portion size was sufficient and there was rice included with the lunch-time deal.
The price for lunch, including the beer and curry with rice, was around £10, which I thought was perfectly acceptable. The restaurant had a modern decor and was spotlessly clean, with some of the best presented toilets that I’ve seen in a while.
This is the site of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Hamburg, which the city thought would be a marvellous idea to knock down between 1804 and 1807. The real problem was that the church had retained a separate authority until the late eighteenth century and the city authorities didn’t like this power base within the city.
The demolition was a distraction for the city, with the need to reinter 25,000 bodies and then destroy the large cathedral building itself. The stone was taken away and reused in construction projects, with very little remaining of either the building or any of its contents.
These 39 benches, which light up at night, mark where the pillars were once located in the five nave cathedral. The site has only been used as a park for the last few years, it was used as a car park for most of the period following the Second World War.
At the side of Domplatz are these sheets of metal which mark the former location of the Hamburg Wallring, or city walls.
