Quays To Success

Hamburg’s renaissance is centred on the docks, but reaches every street corner

- Andrew Eames

There’s a new word on the streets of Germany’s second biggest city: to “cornern”. In our era of smartphones and predictive text, where language gets mashed, this piece of Denglish means to buy a beer from a kiosk and stand on a street corner chatting with a group of friends. It is something of a social phenomenon in the trendier areas of Hamburg on sunny summer evenings. Elements of Hamburg society don’t like this “cornerning”, and it certainly doesn’t sit comfortably with the staid, buttoned-up image of the wealthy trading city. But then this is also the city that has recently been declared the most liveable in Germany (Economist Intelligence Unit), the fourth best city destination in the world (Lonely Planet), and home to the world’s best nightlife (Hostelworld).

Locals are slightly mystified by all these sudden accolades. Hamburg has been like this for a long time, they say, but it seems that the rest of us are only just cottoning on.

There’s a very big reason for this “why now?” A reason that rises proudly from among the former wharves. The Elbphilharmonie, or Elphi for short, is a giant construct of glass and brick, a radical wave-topped warehouse. This hugely expensive concert hall/hotel/apartment block is Hamburg’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower, and it has attracted a staggering four million visitors in its first year of operation. And that includes an awful lot of bloggers and journalists whose media coverage has put the city on the map.

Downtown