a new public square for Copenhagen?
/There are proposals to create a large new public square in Copenhagen on the north side of the central railway station.
The present station was designed by the architect Heinrich Wenck. Work on the building started in 1904 and was completed in 1911. It was constructed across a shallow valley or low ground so trains now leaving the station to head north are well below street level. This left an odd and large void in the street scape although, in the days of steam trains, this must have been important to keep the station platforms as free as possible of smoke and dirt.
The new scheme is to build across this large area of the tracks to create a square with the existing main street of Vesterbrogade across the north side, the main front of the railway station forming the south side and the Astoria Hotel from the 1930s on the west side of the square … an open paved area about 50 metres wide and almost 150 metres from the road to the station. An important part of the new work will be extensive and more rational storage areas for bikes. When the new line of the metro opens in 2018 even more cyclists, using this part of the system as an interchange as they travel in and out of the city, will need somewhere to leave a bike.
