Nørrebro: The Neighbourhood That Has Been Discovered Several Times and Is Still Itself

I moved to Nørrebro from Vesterbro eight years ago because I could not afford Vesterbro anymore and Nørrebro was still affordable. This is a sentence I am aware is funny if you know what Nørrebro costs now.

Nørrebro is the neighbourhood that has been Copenhagen’s “up and coming” area for about twenty-five years, a designation that has not prevented it from becoming expensive while somehow not entirely losing what made it interesting. The explanation is probably demographic: it has a large immigrant and second-generation population that creates a commercial and cultural life not entirely oriented toward the people who arrived later.

Jægersborggade (Jægersborggade, Nørrebro) is the street the design press discovered about fifteen years ago and has written about every few years since. It is genuinely good: independent shops, excellent coffee at The Coffee Collective (coffeecollective.dk — Jægersborggade 10), the Nørrebroparken at the end of it. Worth an afternoon.

Nørrebrogade itself (Nørrebrogade, Nørrebro) is the high street — busy, diverse, the full range of the neighbourhood in one long walk from the lakes to the cemetery. The Assistens Cemetery (Assistens Kirkegård, Kapelvej 4) at the north end is worth going to: Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen are buried there and on a warm afternoon it functions as a park. Copenhagen uses its cemeteries as green space in a way that took me years to find normal and now seems correct.