Speicherstadt

The city of Warehouses in Hamburg is a huge complex of warehouses, the largest in the world. You may think, that these are just boring buildings, but it is not true. That is a unique architectural ensemble, which should be seen in real life. Facades of a city of warehouses – a feature of Hamburg.

At the end of the 19th century, Hamburg joined the German Union and got the right to keep and trade the goods from abroad without taxes. It led to the increase of the trading ships number and, as a consequence, to the need for the port development: people should keep the goods somewhere. That is why, the city constructed a new part of the port – warehouses. These were large buildings, 7 floors in height. All the warehouses made a chain, creating an architectural ensemble of Gothic buildings of red bricks with green roofs.

To make a complex look unusual, it was decided to decorate the warehouses with gables and towers, and to dig some canals, convenient for the ships’ transportation.

The attention was also paid to the bridges, which cross canals. Architects choose metallic constructions, harmonizing with the cranes’ silhouettes. Some of them became, unfortunately, dilapidated and were redone. But 10 of the old bridges are architectural monuments.

Nowadays Speicherstadt is still used as warehouses. Nothing is surprising, the port of Hamburg is the 3rd large port in Europe, the cargos need to be stored somewhere. Some of the warehouses function as museums. As an example, the Marine museum and the Museum of spices. The last one, by the way, is placed in the warehouse, where only spices from the various cities were delivered.