There have been rumours that the Danish National Gallery can no longer afford the cost of maintaining and running the royal cast collection that is currently housed in Vestindisk Pakhus / Westindies Warehouse on Larsens Plads - the long quay between the royal palace and the harbour.

The collection of casts is unique in its size and scope and the plaster copies of classic sculptures had an important role in the training of artists and sculptors at the academy schools in the city. Many of the pieces are very large and some very fragile so if moved the collection would certainly sustain some damage.

The building itself - designed by Casper Frederik Harsdorff - was completed in 1781 and is one of a line of great brick warehouses along the harbour. The rumour is also that the warehouse will be sold but it does not need me to say to a city, whose wealth is based on mercantile trade, that you can only sell a major asset once.

Would it become yet another hotel? Apartments? Surely a waste of a good building? A museum? …. but that’s what it is now and apparently there is no money to run it as a museum.

What the city does not have is a museum of trade. There is to be a new gallery on the history of the port in the new Museum of Copenhagen but is that the best place? And again it comes back to money … not so much for setting it up but, as so often, it’s the problem of ongoing running costs.

The city has only just decided that the 18th-century house on Vesterbrogade - where the Museum of Copenhagen was housed until recently - will not, as originally agreed, be sold but will become a major venue for live music.

This quay - Larsens Plads - was where ships left with emigrants and slightly further down, in front of the double warehouse, there were docks for ferries until just ten or fifteen years ago and just to the north is the custom house.

The harbour has an important annual festival and there are regular major and popular events in the harbour such as stages for the tall ship race and even cliff diving from the roof of the Opera House opposite but there is no obvious focus point in the harbour for all these activities.

So isn’t the warehouse the most obvious place for a new centrepiece for the harbour? And with that it would be a place that could bridge the historic past and the immediate future and possibly represent and take forward an ongoing role for the city in regional trade and travel and migration.

Not a fixed museum collection but a centre for exhibitions and events and a centre for a revival of small-scale maritime trade in the capital region and possibly a catalyst for a revival of trade and transport by sea in the wider area of the Sound and, maybe, even further around and across the Baltic.

As container ships have become bigger and bigger and bigger they have dominated world trade but, because of that size - because their financial viability that comes from scale - they had to move out of the old harbour and with them has gone the most profitable working side of the harbour.

Maritime trade was the reason why the city was here and why it was so successful for a thousand years. But, ironically, could coronavirus and growing uncertainties about global trade mean that there could and should be a careful rethink?

The harbour ferry stops close to the warehouse and the route is possibly to be extended so why can’t that be a starting point for further changes? There are growing problems with too many trains and vehicles using the bridge over the Sound to Sweden so is this now the right time for a fast city centre to city centre ferry service to Malmö? passenger ferries came in to the quay next to the Standard - the building was the ticket and custom office - why not again?

There have been clear proposals to make the historic core of the city centre car free but why not make that part of a first stage for creating a new distribution system for goods based on water traffic? The new harbour ferries are powered by battery and are quiet and environmentally friendly so why not build new distribution centres close to motorways or rail terminals on the edge of the city or with connections to remaining docks where incoming food and goods can be transferred to smaller vessels to serve new delivery routes along the harbour and new markets and new collection points?

The food halls at Israels Plads are incredibly popular so why not more food markets at key points along the harbour? A revived Højbro Plads market? It works well for the Christmas market there so why not for more everyday foods?

There is a fish boat near the kissing bridge …. why not more trading from boats moored at the quay? Last September I came across the boat from Fejø that arrives for a week in Nyhavn just after apples grown in the orchards on the island are harvested. My first reaction was that it looked like something primarily for tourists but that soon changed to wondering how I had not known about this before because they were some of the very best and some of the most reasonably priced apples and plums I have ever eaten.

People in Copenhagen already do much of their shopping by bike and think it’s perfectly sensible and now so normal that they wonder why you comment on it so would it be so odd to to have a real choice, in the near future, to shop by boat or bike?