clapping for Lynetteholm stops

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Work on dredging in the entrance to the harbour, for the construction of the man-made island of Lynetteholm, has been stopped because further reports are now required on the environmental impact of dredging polluted sludge from the site and taking it down the coast to the bay at Køge to dump.

There is growing criticism of the new island and it has become a contentious issue in both parliament and in the press because criticisms or, at the very least least concern, from the Swedish government about the construction work and the island itself was not revealed when a construction act for the work was debated and passed in the Danish parliament.

work to start on dredging for the construction of Lynetteholm January 2022

note:
When I wrote about Lynetteholm in the New Year, I had to confess then that I was not sure what the Danish term klapning meant or rather what it means specifically in this context when clearing the sea bed of sludge by dredging.

The word used in all newspaper articles was klapning but dictionaries and Google always gave me clapping as the English translation but neither word was used in general articles on dredging.

Finally I tracked down the answer.

When sludge is dredged up to clear a channel or, as here, to form a stable base for constructing a man-made island, the sand and mud can be loaded onto large open barges or ships and they sail down the coast where, over a designated site, they open large flaps on the underside of the hull to release the sludge. Those flaps can be opened and closed several times to dislodge everything .... hence clapping. Obvious now I know.

looking out from Nordhavn to the Sound
at the centre of the view is Trekroner Fortet - the Three Crowns Fortress - built in the 1780s to guard the entrance to the harbour

the new island will fill the whole horizon beyond the fort with just a narrow channel for boats to enter and leave the inner harbour

by 2070, when building work on the island is set to be completed, this view will be filled by the skyline of new housing for 35,000 people

 

an introduction to Kalvebod Brygge

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Planning is about the future. That's in the very word itself. We plan to do something ... planning is not retrospective. But it really is important to understand how we got here - why a street or group of buildings is as it is - to understand how and why what we have is good or bad and to use that to inform what happens next.

The history of Kalvebod Brygge is fascinating and complicated but, in terms of history, all relatively recent and all recorded on the maps produced over the last 100 years or so.

Primarily, the development of the south harbour is a lesson in how economic and political events often move faster than the best-laid plans for our streets and squares and, too often, a complicated scheme of renewal or development can take so long to realise that it is redundant or inappropriate by the time it is completed.

 

1912

1945

1967

Until the late 19th century, the harbour south of what is now Langebro was a wide bay.

In the middle of the 19th century a new railway from Copenhagen to Roskilde was laid out along the north beach of the bay, along what is now Sønder Boulevard. In commercial terms, the close proximity of water and railways is catnip for development … as much back then in the 19th century as it is now.

First a meat market and gas works were built out into the bay with wharves for the delivery of coal for both the gas works and then for a new electricity works built immediately south of Tivoli. That was superseded in 1932, when the coal-fired power station of HC Ørstedværket opened.

There were wood yards between the harbour and Ny Glyptotek when it was built in the 1890s but these were rapidly replaced with new streets and apartment buildings.

A new central railway station was built in 1911 and the railway was taken out on a wider curve on yet more land claimed from the bay and, for the first time, Bernstorffsgade, between the new station and Tivoli, became a main road though, initially, it did not continue much further than the south-west corner of Tivoli and certainly not as far as the harbour.

At about the same time, so from about 1890, the line of the shore of Amager, opposite, was also being pushed further and further out into the bay and both sides of the approach to Langebro became docks.

If you use the word port it usually conjurers up the image of ocean-going liners but this was docks .... vital, hard working but fairly grubby commercial quays for coal, grain, sand and building materials and soy beans and sugar. The sort of goods carried in freighters.

On the city side, these  commercial docks continued all the way up to Knipplesbro so across where the National Library and BLOX are now.

Rail tracks came off the outside curve of the main railway and ran all the way up the city side as far as Nyhavn and at Langebro the railway crossed over to Amager and ran down quays on the Islands Brygge side … all for goods and not for passengers.

The area where Kalvebod Brygge is now was mainly rail sidings and marshalling yards and, although it might seem incredible now, this was where, around 1969,  the city built the first container port. The main area for transferring containers from ships to railway trucks - then a very new system for shipping goods - was on new yards where the service depot of the metro is now.

There were soon huge new cranes along the quay for transferring containers but it was early days for this new form of shipping and there are accounts of early attempts to pick up and move containers with a fork-lift truck on each side in, what sounds like, a dangerous balancing act or containers were lifted up from the end which blocked the driver’s view of where he was going and it can’t have been that good for the cargo to have the container tipped up at an angle.

There was still a large building of circa 1910 that had been a pig market on the quayside although it had been used as a garage for some time. It was demolished in 1966 and work started on extending Bernstorffsgade down across the site of the market as far as the quay and then a main road, a dual carriageway, was constructed along the quay - and that is what is now Kalvebod Brygge - to be the main fast route into and out of the city.

This was part of wider plans to modernise radically the road system of the old city with wide and fast new roads. It was the period when there were even plans to build a motorway down the lakes as an inner ring road and the period when large blocks of old buildings in the north corner of the old city were demolished and the first glass and steel office buildings were constructed within the old defences.

But events and world economics and technology were moving faster than the plans and the dock was in decline. Not least, the problem was that the docks had to deal with larger and larger ships and these would all have meant the raising of Knipplesbro and Langebro and the opening of the rail bridge at Langebro to let them through. The docks in the south harbour went into decline and the focus turned to large new facilities at Nordhavn and on the expansion of other ports in Denmark

If the office buildings along Kalvebod Brygge can be criticised, it is because they are uninspiring and waste an amazing location but, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s, the city was facing bankruptcy and a new business area and any way to revitalise the harbour was better than any alternative. Award-winning architecture was not a priority.

on the city side, the commercial quays continued as far as Knippelsbro

the pig market that was demolished in 1966 for the extension of Bernstorffsgade as far as Kalvebode Brygge - Copenhagen Archive 42126

construction work for Kalvebod Brygge - Copenhagen Archive 91920
the building immediately below the end of the crane is what is now KB32

Bernstorffsage and Kalvebod Brygge in 1989 - the tower block is now a hotel and the car park to its right is the site of the new Scandic Spectrum hotel
the area of grass to the left is where the SEB offices are now
note the commercial/industrial building north of the police station - the building with a circular courtyard
that site too is now a hotel

 

the harbour and the future of Nyholm

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The Danish Navy maintain an important though reduced presence in Copenhagen - with the main naval bases for the country now in Frederikshaven and Korsør - but there are plans for much that is still here to be moved away from the city and recently there have been discussions to decide on the most appropriate use for the historic naval buildings on Nyholm.

This is an important part of the harbour and not just because Nyholm is prominent on the east side of the entrance to the historic inner harbour but also because the island has an important and symbolic place in the history of the city … on the emplacement at the north end of the islands are guns for official salutes to mark royal and national occasions; the flag flown here has huge significance and when the royal yacht returns to Copenhagen, it is moored immediately north of Nyholm.

There are important historic buildings here including two of the most extraordinary buildings in the city … the Mast Crane that is an amazing example of maritime engineering and the Hovedvagt, or Main Guard House, with a feature on the roof that looks like a giant chess piece. Both date from the middle of the 18th century and both are by the important architect Philip de Lange.

photograph taken from the harbour ferry as it pulled in at the landing stage just below Skuespilhuset - the National Theatre.

Nyholm is the island between the Opera House and Refshaleøen and at the centre of this view is the distinct silhouette of the 17th-century Mast Crane

note:
the cormorants are on an artificial reef that was created in 2017 to encourage biodiversity in the harbour. The University of Aarhus has produced a report on the Restoration of Stone Reefs in Denmark

 

land from the sea

With the ongoing development of Nordhavn - the north harbour - and plans for a large, man-made island to, in effect, link Nordhavn with Refshaleøen, it is too easy to think that claiming large areas of new land from the sea for building is a modern phenomenon that is possible only now with modern engineering and modern technology but, in reality, of course, the city has been building out into the sea for over 400 years.

If you stand on Gammel Strand now, then you are right in the centre of the built-up city but if you had stood there at the end of the 16th century you would have looked across a wide area of open water to the low-lying island of Amager about 2 kilometres away and with just a few islands between including the island of the royal castle standing just off the shore.

Even then, Gammel Strand could not be described as being on rock-solid ground as wharves and warehouses had been built out from the shore as the importance of the port meant more and ever bigger ships were trading here but it was Christian IV who deliberately, and with foresight, developed the naval dock and boat yards below the castle and used Dutch engineers to set out and construct a series of canals and islands for a new town for merchants in the water between the castle and the island of Amager that is still at the heart of Christianshavn.

Initially, naval docks were developed on either side of the castle with a new arsenal and warehousing for supplies and shipyards including rope works and sail-making workshops.

Christianshavn was protected across its east and south sides by high banks and with a defended gate to get to and from Amager - in case armies landed on the island and attack the city from the south - but the main development of the harbour came in the middle and the late 17th century when these defences were extended in a great arc eastwards and north to provided sheltered and defended moorings for the naval fleet … a segment shaped area that is over 1.5 kilometres from, Christianshavn to the entrance to the harbour at Nyholm, and, at the widest point, almost a kilometre across. Work was given permission to proceed in 1682 and by 1692 the defences and new ship-building yards at Nyholm were far enough advanced for the first ships to be completed and launched.

Through the 18th and 19th centuries, more and more islands were constructed within this area leaving canals and areas of open water so that naval stores, shipyards, barracks and so on could be moved out from the area around the castle.

With all this major work, commercial merchant shipping also moved out from the centre both north, first to Nyhavn constructed between 1670 and 1675 and then along new quays between Nyhavn and Kastellet, close to the royal palace, and eventually as far out as the Free Harbour opened in 1904. There was also enlargement of the harbour to the south with coal and timber yards along the city side of Kalvebod and new wharves built out from Islands Brygge that remained busy until the 1960s. The last stage of the development, in terms of claiming land from the sea, was as recent as the 1950s with the development of Refshaleøen and its ship yards beyond the naval area and later again, at the north edge of Amager, oil facilities and waste and sewage and water treatment works.

If you are looking for the source of the wealth and the political and economic strength of the city, and therefore, by extension, the wealth of the country, then the greatest single resource, over half a millennium, has been relatively shallow and relatively sheltered coastal waters where it has been possible to construct artificial islands so the city can expand and prosper.

That is precisely why any future development out into the sea has to be debated and considered and questioned because it is an exceptionally important resource and like so much else it is running out … or at least the areas close to the city has been exploited. New islands will be more of a challenge, will demand more infrastructure - as they are further from the centre - and will have at least some impact on the character of the city as it is now.

future development on Nyholm

In Danmarks hovedstad Initiativer til styrkelse af hovestadsrådet / Denmark's capital city Initiatives to strengthen the metropolitan area - a government report published in January 2019 - it was suggested that there could be housing on Nyholm but surely the island is too important to be relegated to an expensive development plot unless perhaps new buildings are linked back to the navy so, for instance, for a naval hospital or naval retirement home.

Intensive development on Amager and at the South Harbour was justified because releasing land there for dense housing developments was lucrative for the port and city authority and money raised was used directly to finance the construction of the Metro. There is no such financial imperative for Nyholm and very expensive and, presumably, very exclusive apartment buildings should surely not be the immediate go-to solution for any and every planning scheme in the city.

 
 
 

1624

1685

1692

detail of map from 1860
this shows the Nye Dok - the first stage of what is now the island of the Opera House - and ‘Toldbod Bom’ which restricted access to the moorings of the inner harbour but was also a foot bridge from the city side of the harbour to Nyholm … at the beginning of each working day men would wait at Toldbod and if selected would cross to the dockyard but If not selected there was a possibility of work in the afternoon although only if they waited
What is now Reshaleøen was then open water so from the Kastellet there was a clear view out to the sound and guns could be fired across the entrance to the harbour if the city and the harbour were attacked

 
 

1  Rigets flag og batteriet Sixtus / Kingdom Flag and Battery of Christian VI
2  Elefanten / the Elephant - the quay or mole 1728
3  Hovedvagten / Main Guard House “Under the Crown” by Philip de Lange 1744
4  Masterkranen / Mast Crane by Philp de Lange 1749
5  Planbygningen / The Plan or Drawing Building 1764
6  Marinekaserne / Marine Barracks of 1910 by Valdemar Birkmand
7  Arresten / Judgement? 1891
8  Spanteloftsbygningenby 1742
9  Østre Takkeladshus  / East Wareouse store for rigging 1723-1729
10  Vestre  Takkeladshus / West Warehouse 1729
11  Søminevæsntes værksted / Sailmakers' workshops 1878

view across to Nyholm from the south - from the canal to the east of the opera house

Spanteloftsbygningen looking across the canal from the south east

above, the Mast Crane from the south with the low but wide Drawing Building to its east

Søminegraven - the canal along the east side of Nyholm from the south

Hovedvagt - Main Guard House or ‘Under the Crown’ from the east designed by Philip de Lange

Workshops at the south-east corner of Nyholm built in the late 19th-century

 

Lynetteholmen - a new island across the harbour

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Included by ministers in the launch in January of their 52 point Capital Initiative was a major project for a large, new island to be constructed across the entrance to the harbour. Work could start in 2035.

Under a heading Room for Everyone it was, in fact, the first point of the 52 - but already the proposal seems to have generated a fair amount of criticism.

The island, to be called Lynetteholmen, could have housing for at least 35,000 people and eventually work for as many and would include coastal protection measures to stop surges of storm water entering the inner harbour but it would have a fundamental impact on the character of the inner harbour by closing off views out to the sound and would restrict the routes of access into the harbour for large and small vessels.

Although the new cruise ship terminal at Nordhavn is outside the proposed island, the drawing shows further quays for large ships on the seaward side of the new island so it is not clear if these would replace the present berths for cruise ships along Langelinie Kaj.

note:

Politiken published an article on the 3 March with comments from a workshops with architects and engineers and planners where it was suggested that the island, as shown in the drawing first presented by the Prime Minister in October, is too close to the Trekroner fortress and is too large with several critics suggesting that it should be broken down into a series of smaller islands. No further decisions can be made until tests of the sea bed are completed and until related projects are confirmed including the plan for a major road link across the east side of the city that would have to cross the harbour and the proposal for an extension of the metro through a tunnel between Refshaleøen and Nordhavn.