Copenhagen - Around the Three Lakes Travel Guides | Copenhagen | Sub Regions | Copenhagen - Around the Three Lakes

With parts of central Copenhagen a tad too manicured and mono-cultural for its own good, the workaday, multi-cultural feel of Nørrebro provides a healthy antidote. As in Vesterbro, young professionals are gentrifying the area with voguish cafés, bars and clothes shops, but it is the Palestinians, Turks, Asians and other immigrants who bring a tang of cosmopolitanism to the street life. Nørrebro is a good hunting ground for clothes and Danish bric-a-brac of the sort not found back home, while the Workers’ (Arbejdermuseet) and Police museums acknowledge in their different ways the area’s proletarian identity. Every 1 May, a colourful procession of workers wends its way through Nørrebro to the sound of brass instruments. Also in the neighbourhood is Assistens Kirkegård, a calm oasis for a rest or picnic and as far from being a gloomy cemetery as anyone could wish. Across the bridge from Nørrebro, on the city side of the lakes, where the Botanic Gardens provide another green space, there are two top-notch art galleries. One is the esteemed Danish National Gallery with major works of European art, while tucked away behind it is the lesser-known but highly rewarding Den Hirschsprungske Samling, a treasure trove of Danish art from the last two centuries.

Sights

Statens Museum for Kunst

Sølvgade 48, T 33748494, http://www.smk.dk Tue-Sun 1000-1700, Wed 1000-2000, closed on public holidays, Easter Monday, Whit Monday, 23-5 Dec, 30 Dec-1 Jan. Adults 50kr. Free Wed. During Jul and Aug there are free guided tours in English at weekends, see website for details, and tickets are available up to half an hour in advance. Buses 10, 14, 40, 42, 43, 184, 185, 150S, 72E, 79E, 173E. S-Tog Østerport, Nørreport. Metro, Nørreport.

Although the Danish National Gallery is not up there with the world class leaders, you may well find yourself planning a second visit because of the rich variety of Danish and non-Danish work on show. Seven centuries of art are represented, from the Italian Renaissance to modern art, and the free miniguide with concise, intelligent comment is available with your ticket, and it serves to highlight two dozen paintings that reflect the quality and variety of the permanent collections. Focus is also given to the changing ‘exhibit of the month’, (see the website for details), and top marks to the gallery’s policy of mounting special displays that address the works of one artist or, more interestingly, a particular theme that may have a topical relevance. Look out, too, for international touring exhibitions which often use the gallery. They can stay for months and can justify a visit in their own right. There is a children’s section to the gallery, an exemplary bookshop and a stylish café .

Stockholmsgade 20, T 35420336, http://www.hirschsprung.dk Thu-Mon 1100-1600, Wed 1100-2100. Adults 25kr. Free Wed. Buses 10, 14, 40, 42, 43, 72E, 79E, 150S, 184,185. S-Tog, Østerport, Nørreport. Metro, Nørreport.

Heinrich Hirschsprung (1836-1908) was a tobacco magnate who built up a personal collection of Danish art and later donated it to the nation on condition that a suitable building was built to house the paintings. The result is a house with a series of interconnecting rooms that function as small galleries and, although some of the exhibits could charitably be called mediocre (like no 443 in room 19), there are some real delights that will surprise the visitor. The best-known painter of Denmark’s Golden Age was and still is CW Eckersberg (1783-1853) and his fresh concern with the everyday world influenced the work of students of his like Christen Købke and Wilhelm Bendz, both of whom are represented here with accomplished works in room 2. Eckersberg studied and worked in Paris and Rome before returning to Copenhagen as Professor of Painting in the Academy of Fine Arts and earning commissions from the city’s emerging middle-class merchants, as evidenced in his Portrait of Mrs Schmidt (no 112, room 1). The glum Mrs Schmidt is offset by the bourgeois voyeurism of his Woman before a Mirror (no 123, room 1), which plays cleverly with concealment, while Dreyer’s Barrow on the Island of Brandsø (no 100, room 5) openly reveals all, past and present, in a Danish summer landscape of lush freshness. A complete contrast is found in the haunting landscape that forms the background of Nielsen’s The Blind Girl (no 338, room 19), a startling and arresting portrayal of blindness. There are a number of paintings of couples that throw up interesting comparisons, from the voluptuous decadence of Zahrtmann’s court painting in room 13 to the muted symbolism of Ring’s Spring (no 402, room 19) and the silent social criticism of Henningsen’s The Murder of a Child (no 154, room 12). A favourite of many is Anna Ancher’s The Maid in the Kitchen (no 7, room 20), perhaps because of the way it suggests one of Vermeer’s Dutch interiors, and Spring by the Pre-Raphaelites-inspired Harald Slott- Møller. Given that most of what you see will be unfamiliar, and the lack of details attached to the canvases, the booklet that focuses on 20 of the collection’s major works is well worth purchasing.

Gothersgade 128, T 35322240, http://www.botanic-garden.ku.dk May-Sep 0800-1800, Oct-Apr 0830-1600. Palmhouse Tue-Sun 1000-1500. Cactus and orchid greenhouses Wed, Sat, Sun, 1300-1500. Free. Museum Jun-Aug, Mon-Fri 1300-1530, Sat-Sun 1300-1430. Adults 50kr. Buses 5, 7, 14, 16, 24, 40, 43, 84, 384. S-Tog and Metro, Nørreport.

Creatively occupying what was once the city’s northern fortifications, the present Botanic Gardens were laid out in 1871 as a resource for the botany department of Copenhagen University. Part of the defensive moat was remodelled as a lake and the rock garden utilizes the old ramparts, and pathways weave their way around the garden areas allowing visitors to wander about the grounds. Some 25,000 specimens from 13,000 species are growing in the Gardens, half of which are not the kind found growing in ordinary gardens, and a small shop just inside the entrance on Øster Farimagsgade (the other entrance is at the corner of Gothersgade and Øster Voldgade) sells a selection of seeds of the more uncommon ones. The palmhouse, modelled on London’s Kew Gardens, is an atmospheric steamhouse of giant palms and lily-clad ponds and, next door, the cactus and orchid green- houses are home to some 1,000 species of cactus and half that number of orchids. Behind the palmhouse the Café Paradisfuglen (Bird of Paradise) serves pastries, ice creams, beer, wine and sandwiches. The summer-only museum is near the entrance at the corner of Gothersgade and Øster Voldgade.

Øster Voldgade 5, T 35322345, http://www.geological-museum.dk Tue-Sun 1300-1400. Adults 25kr, children 10kr. Free Wed. Buses 5, 10, 14, 16, 31, 42, 43, 184, 185, 150S, 350S. S-Tog and Metro, Nørreport.

The Geological Museum is not as dull as you might imagine and while it may take a special interest to get excited by the vast array of minerals, there are interesting exhibits to be found, like the 150 million-year-old imprint of a jellyfish and the fossilized footprint trod in volcanic ash some 250,000 years ago. The collection of meteorites from Greenland is especially impressive – is it possible that Peter Høeg first got his idea for Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow from a visit here?

Rømersgade 22, T 33933388, http://www.arbejdermuseet.dk Jan-Jun, Tue-Sat 1000-1600, Jul-Oct 1000-1600, Nov-Dec 1000-1600. Adults 50kr, children 30kr. Buses 5, 14, 16, 31, 40, 42, 43,173, 184, 185, 350S. S-Tog and Metro, Nørreport.

The worthy Workers’ Museum is beginning to look a little tired, and space becomes cramped as so many aspects of working-class life are exhibited in the small rooms, but partly as a result the right kind of atmosphere prevails for a visual history of deprivation and inequality. From the fading colours of the artefacts emerge glimpses of the hard life endured by workers and their families – like the table turned upside down to form a child’s bed – and noticeably absent are products of the famous Danish designers. A personal story is told of the Sorenson family who moved into a new flat in 1915. Their apartment and its contents were donated to the museum by a daughter who occupied it until she moved into a nursing home in 1990. Traditional Danish food and drinks are available in the period café in the basement of the museum.

Israels Plads, once the site of the city’s main vegetable market, still a market atmosphere with stalls selling fruit, vegetables and flowers and discount-seeking shoppers. Adjoining the square, Ørsteds Parken is named after the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsteds who discovered electromagnetism. There is a summer café in the middle of the park, while back at Israels Plads on Saturdays a flea market springs to life, with some of the city’s antique shops setting up stalls to retail their less costly merchandise.

Kapelvej. Free. Buses 5, 16,18, 350S. S-Tog and Metro, Nørreport.

Far from being soul mates, Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard nevertheless found a common resting place in death, both being buried in Assistens Kirkegård. Not the only famous figures in the cemetery, the Danish winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, Niels Bohr, and the Kansas jazz tenorist Ben Webster are also here. These famous graves are signposted. However, there is more to Assistens Kirkegård than morbid lists of the dead famous, as seen by the way Copenhageners treat it as a public park, picnicking and sunbathing in the open spaces under the magnolia trees. The civic authorities haven’t gone to the extent of placing benches amid the tombs, but it is easy to find a spot to sit and relax.

Fælledvej 20, T 35368888. Tue, Thu and Sun 1100-1600. Adults 25kr. Buses 3, 5, 16, 350S.

Although the amount of information in English in the Police Museum is not tremendous, the exhibits tell their own graphic stories in what was the city’s first proper police station when it opened over a century ago. As well as old police badges, uniforms and motorbikes, there are well-presented displays on various facets of the city’s criminal past that do not pull any punches when it comes to portraying the more unsavoury aspects of violent crime and violent punishment.

Buses 3, 5, 16, 350S.

Just up the road from the museum at Sankt Hans Torv, a large junction where half a dozen streets converge, a rather different class of citizens to those who feature in the Police Museum come out to role play around the chic cafés in the summer months. Nørrebro’s renaissance began when canny young professionals started taking advantage of the neighbourhood’s low rents and before long a number of bars and two cafés, the now famous Sebastopol and Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus , emerged to help service their relatively prosperous lifestyle. When the sun comes out, so too do the tables, chairs and parasol heaters of the cafés and the square becomes a lively social venue. Around the corner is the newly opened four-screen Empire cinema and one of Copenhagen’s better-known nightclubs, Rust .

Buses 5,16, 350S.

Pedestrianized Blågårdsgade, the second street on your left off Nørrebrogade after crossing the bridge from the city centre, is probably the most interesting street in the neighbourhood. Besides its low-key boutiques retailing affordable designer wear and off-beat eateries that make those on Sankt Hans Torv seem bourgeois, there is a gratifying mix of people cutting across class and colour lines. Palestinians rub shoulders with south Asians, young non-mainstream professionals with anarchists, and half way down the street there is a large square, Blågårds Plads, with a playground and benches.

Buses 1, 3, 42, 43, 184, 185, 150S.

North of the lakes and to the west of Nørrebro lies the ample space of Fælled Park and, abutting it, the 40,000-seat National Stadium (Parken Stadium). The park was established in 1900 as an open space for the enjoyment of working people and so makes an appropriate venue for the festival that unfolds when the 1 May marchers reach their terminus in the park. There is a skateboard arena and open-air swimming pool within the park, playgrounds for children and a pleasant open-air café and restaurant. Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen records how crucial conversations took place in the park between the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his German friend the physicist Heisenberg over the Nazi’s ability to manufacture an atomic bomb.

Universitetsparken 15, T 35321001, http://www.zoologiskmuseum.dk Tue-Sun 1100-1700. Adults 25kr, children 10kr. Buses 18, 24, 43, 150S, 184, 185.

Not just a great place for children, the Zoological Museum has a wide appeal and its new exhibition – From Mammoth Steppe to Cultural Steppe – tells an exciting tale of zoological history from 20,000 years ago to the present. Interestingly too, the museum does not restrict itself to the kind of animal life that city dwellers rarely encounter and a diorama comes alive with non-human urban life. As well as all this, there is the usual array of stuffed animals from around the world, some fairly impressive stuffed walruses and the skeleton of a bowhead whale some 14 m long.

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