The Danes will not push past you on a cycling lane. They will ring their bell once. This is considered sufficient warning. If you do not move, they will ring again. There is no third ring — after that they find a way around you, and you are simply a person who did not understand…
When I was a child, Vesterbro was the neighbourhood parents warned you about. The Kødbyen was an actual meatpacking district. The canal front at Christianshavn was industrial. The harbour was not swimmable. All of these things have changed. The harbour water quality improvement programme started in the 1990s and is one of the genuine civic…
I was born here. These are the things I know that I did not learn from a guide. The free swimming beyond the famous spots: the Kastrup Søbad (Kastrup Strandpark, Amager) is a wooden sea bathing facility on the coast of Amager that is empty on weekdays and has the sea rather than the harbour….
My grandmother lived in Vesterbro her whole life. Her father was a dock worker. Her building was demolished in the slum clearances of the 1970s and she moved to a social housing block in Amager. The building she grew up in is now an upscale residential development. Copenhagen’s transformation over the past thirty years is…
The tourist version of Copenhagen nightlife is the Kødbyen and the canal bars and the rooftop venues that appear in the design press. These are all real and some of them are good. The local version overlaps with the tourist version only partially. Nørrebro at night: the stretch of Nørrebrogade around the Superkilen park (Nørrebrogade…
Hygge has become a global brand. It is in books in airport shops in seventeen languages. The word is real and the thing it describes is real. It refers to a quality of atmosphere and social interaction — warmth, comfort, the absence of strain, the presence of people you want to be with. It is…
Mikkeller started in Copenhagen in 2006 as a home-brewing experiment by a schoolteacher and became one of the most recognised craft beer brands in the world. This is relevant context for understanding what happened to craft beer in Copenhagen: it got serious very early and has been serious for long enough that it has moved…
Copenhagen has been called the most liveable city in the world by various indices for a decade. It has also been called the design capital of Europe, the happiest city on earth, and the sustainable city of the future. These descriptions are not wrong exactly. They describe something about the city that exists. They leave…
The Kødbyen — the old Meatpacking District in Vesterbro — has been the centre of Copenhagen nightlife for about fifteen years. I have a complicated relationship with this because I work there during the day and because I remember when the bars arrived and because I have watched the neighbourhood transform around them. What it…
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…
My parents ran a printing shop on Istedgade. They opened it in 1989 when the street was something the city wanted to look away from — sex workers, heroin, cheap hotels, the specific poverty of a neighbourhood that functions as a city’s pressure valve. They closed it in 2019 when the rent made it impossible….