Beside and beneath the water, Hamburg

By Paul Scraton:

We walk through the Speicherstadt between red-brick warehouses, home to trading companies dealing in carpets and tea, as well as record labels, new media start-ups and advertising agencies. We are not alone. On the bridge a tour guide tells his group the story of this port city, and the outdoor cafes by the bridge linking the warehouse district with the city centre are packed with every table taken. In Berlin the return of visitors has been slow, and it appears they have all come to Hamburg. 

Socially distanced queues lead up to the entrance of the Elbphilharmonie… no concerts today but tours and visits to the terrace with its views of the Elbe and across to the cranes and ships of the port. On the raised promenade beside the elevated Baumwall U-Bahn station, hundreds of people move back and forth, in search of the perfect photograph of the new concert hall or perhaps a late morning fischbrötchen and an early glass of Astra beer. At the St Pauli Landungsbrücken the piers are also busy, as people move between ferries and trains, take their seat at a restaurant with a river view or find their land legs after disembarking from a harbour cruise. 

We escape the crowds by going underground, taking the stairs until we reach the bottom of an eighty foot high entrance hall. Somehow we missed the entrance to the lifts, manned by guards in facemasks, bringing the cyclists and pedestrians down to the start of the old Elbtunnel. No cars are allowed down here right now, as renovations continue, and there are not so many of us making the crossing to Steinwerder on foot or bike. It is cool and calm in the tunnel beneath the river, although hard to imagine that giant ocean-going vehicle transporter, bound for Morocco, that would have passed over our heads had we been down here just a few hours before.

At Steinwerder we take the lift back up to the surface, wandering around the building to a lookout point with its kiosk selling fish rolls and an ice cream van. People use the tunnel to go to work or get home, but on this Monday in July it felt like most had made the crossing for no other reason than its novelty value, to look at the city from across the water. And, perhaps, in these strange, distanced times, to get away from the crowds above. 

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Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).