the rain is coming - Sankt Kjelds Plads

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Sankt Kjelds Plads looking south from Æbeløgade and the view up Bryggervangen towards the Plads with the new areas for planting under construction in July 2018

new storm drains going in along the road edge (above)
drawing from SLA showing the extent of the scheme from Sankt Kjelds Plads and north and south along Bryggervangen  (below)

 

Less than 100 metres from Tåsinge Plads is Sankt Kjelds Plads - a second phase of work for new drain systems with hard landscaping and appropriate planting to cope with the inundation of water from rain storms. 

Here there is a large traffic intersection with Bryggervangen running through from north east to south west and three other roads - Nygårdsvej from the east, Æbeløgade from the north west and Sejrøgade from the south west - meeting at a large space that was until recently laid out as a large traffic round-a-bout.

A new scheme with holding tanks for rainwater, new storm drains and a series of water features and extensive planting have been designed by SLA.

New areas of paving and traffic calming with new marked bays to control car parking is well in hand.

It is not just the road intersection that will have new planting but the long diagonal run of Bryggervangen is part of the work and this will form a new green corridor from a small lake and open ground several blocks to the north at Kildevældssøen and continuing south towards the open space of Fælledparken.

the new climate district - by Tredje Natur

 

A local store has a window covered with a huge illustration of the finished scheme.

 

a new road tunnel alongside city hall?

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proposal by Tredje Natur for the new landscape of HC Andersens Boulevard
if most of the traffic is taken down into a new tunnel

possible routes for a new North Harbour Tunnel and a possible tunnel
from Bispeengbuen to Islands Brygge

 

A proposal for a major engineering project, to construct a tunnel down the west side of the historic city centre, is now in doubt.

It would take underground much of the traffic that now drives along HC Andersens Boulevard on the west side of the city hall and would have much more impact on the inner city than a north-harbour tunnel. 

It is also more controversial than the north tunnel because it would be expensive; because there would be complicated gains; some people would resent this as the first stage of banning traffic from the centre with all the restrictions that implies and there could be considerable disruption during construction work … although, actually, most people in the city seem to accept major engineering works as now somehow part of everyday life in Copenhagen with the extent of the works and the time scale for the current work on building a new metro line.

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Sankt Annæ Plads

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Sankt Annæ Plads - Saint Anne’s Square or Saint Anne’s Place - is almost back to normal after extensive excavations and engineering works to install storm drains. This has been necessary to cope with surface water when there are massive rain storms. With changes to the climate because of global warming sudden and devastating rain storms are becoming much more common and when the equivalent of a normal month of rain can fall in a few hours then the existing drains in the city cannot cope. 

I actually experienced one of these storms just a few months after moving to Copenhagen. The first apartment I rented was on Bredgade and like many of the older buildings in the city we all had storage space in the basement for boxes and suitcases and spare furniture and so on. One morning I was looking out of the window amazed to see the amount of rain falling - quite literally torrents - when my phone rang and it was a neighbour suggesting I should go down and move as much as possible out of my store as rain was pouring in from the windows set low on the pavement side and was running down the external steps from the courtyard. The street was like a fast flowing stream as the drains just could not carry away that much water.

One of several ongoing schemes to resolve the problem has been to cut drains along the street, between the pavement and the road so, instead of a shallow gutter with grills at intervals, there is now a continuous grid and below it a wide concrete channel.

At Saint Anne’s Square the cobbles around the equestrian statue of Christian X have been reset to form a shallow and almost imperceptible basin so storm water in Bredgade will be encouraged to take a sharp turn into the square rather than running on down the street. There are the new surface drains on either side but also the area of grass that runs down the centre of the Plads has been lowered to absorb more water quickly.

 

the new storm drains about to be laid along the edge of the road last winter

 

If this all seems like a storm in a tea cup, as it were, the cost of storm damage and the disruption to businesses as they have to repair floors and replace plaster and electric wiring and so on is serious and the quantities of water are amazing. There is so much water running off the streets during these storms that sewers burst as water overflows from the street drains and the volume of water is almost impossible to imagine. Sankt Annæ Plads runs down from Bredgade, down from the statue to the harbour but potentially there is so much water coming off the streets in the district that it can cause problems if it is released straight into the harbour, particularly if it has been contaminated with sewage, so the most important part of the recent works was the construction of a massive holding tank that takes up to 9 million litres of water and from there it will be released as slowly as possible into the harbour. I think that tank is actually under new steps at the end of the basin by the Admiral Hotel and is part of the rebuilding of the pier to the north of the theatre that is now called Ofelia Plads. Walking past the works it was difficult to look behind the hoardings to see exactly which area was excavated and just how large and deep that tank is but for 9 million litres it must be big … not an amount I find easy to imagine or visualise.

 

the grass down the centre of Sankt Annæ Plads is back but at a lower level

 

the harbour end of Sankt Annæ Plads looking across the basin and the new steps ... somehow there is a holding tank for 9 million litres of rain water below this area

 

Around the city there are many more programmes of engineering work or solutions that use new surfacing materials or an imaginative redesign of park landscapes to deal with the problem of storm water ... see the post rains and drains ... and last year there was an exhibition, The Rains are Coming, at the Danish Architecture Centre about what is being done in the city to deal with increasingly heavy rain fall.