Germany Guide
Hamburg
The city centre
If their semi-circular shape doesn't drop a heavy hint, names of the roads that end in "wall" give away the path of the defences that girdled the city until Napoleon added a new prize to his empire. The boundary still defines the city centre, officially comprised of the Altstadt (bordered to the north by the Alsterfleet canal) and the Neustadt (everywhere else in the centre). If the demarcation between these two is unnoticeable today, it is somewhat academic historically, too. Just 380 years after Charlemagne rode out across a sandy hummock between the Elbe and the Alster in 808 and built the "Hammaburg" ring fort on the site of a Saxon village, Count Adolph III of Schauenburg began to draw up the new boundaries for the fledgling city.
However, districts can be distinguished within the seamless spread of architecture. As ever, the heart of the city is the Rathaus. The Great Fire of 1842 then Allied bombs a century later wiped most historic architecture from the streetscape, but the jumble of postwar styles has its own dynamism. What little survived fire and war is in the city's oldest quarters south of the Altstadt, at its most historic in Deichtsrasse. Beyond it are the port warehouse district, Speicherstadt and adjoining HafenCity, that feature some of the most distinctive harbour architecture in Europe – old and new. The hub of current port activity is St-Pauli-Landungsbrücken a fifteen-minute walk west. The area north of Rathaus is characterized by luxury shopping boutiques and the lovely Alster lakes that define the centre, while east towards the Hauptbahnhof are principal shopping high streets Steinstrasse and Mönckebergstrasse. The Kunsthalle near the Hauptbahnhof represents the start of Hamburg's Kunstmeile, the "art mile" that is home to the city's blockbuster cultural museums.
The Fischmarkt
Official records reveal the Fischmarkt as the city's oldest market, but that rather misses the point. Hamburg's Sunday market retains the same hours as when it began in 1703 – from 5 to 9.30am (from 7am Nov– March) – yet its focus shifted from sales to celebration long ago. And just as it's doubtful that modern traders pack up to go to church as their predecessors did, so fish now takes second place to a mind-boggling sprawl of wares, from genuine bargains to tat, from fruit and veg to livestock. The story goes that in the early 1960s The Beatles received a police warning for chasing a live pig they bought here among the stalls.
Even that is civilized stuff compared to the action in the iron Fischauktionshalle. Where Altona's fishing fleet once sold its catch, late-night casualties from St Pauli cross paths with early birds, as everyone sinks a beer and bellows along to live rock bands while bemused tourists look on. Unless you're in a sympathetically booze-fuelled frame of mind, such raw exuberance at such an early hour can be hard to stomach. Fortunately, cafés on the first floor are a safe haven from where to watch the chaos over a buffet breakfast.