Hamburg is a city that has been rebuilt twice within living memory. A fire in May 1842 destroyed roughly a third of the old city center, and bombing in 1943 destroyed much of it again. We spent a full day inside and around the Speicherstadt, the largest warehouse district in the world built on a single set of wooden piles, moving between five stops. Each one explains a different piece of how the city came to look the way it does now.

Hamburg holds a great deal more than these five stops we visited. The Hamburger Kunsthalle covers eight centuries of painting across three connected buildings on the city’s Kunstmeile. A short walk from it, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, founded in 1877, holds four thousand years of design across European, East Asian, and Islamic collections. The Museum of Hamburg History, open since 1922, keeps its own scale model of the historic port. None of these fit into this visit. Our Schengen days are limited, and a ferry to the UK out of the Schengen area was already booked, so this day was what the schedule allowed. Hamburg’s other museums stay on the list for a later trip back.

Miniatur Wunderland

Miniatur Wunderland sits inside a restored brick warehouse in the Speicherstadt. It holds the largest model railway system in the world. The idea began in the year 2000, when Frederik Braun and his twin brother Gerrit borrowed two million Deutsche Marks from a bank to build it. The doors opened in August 2001.

The layout now covers close to fifteen hundred square metres. It includes over nine miles of track, more than a thousand trains, and hundreds of thousands of miniature figures, all built at a scale of 1 to 87. Demand for tickets is high enough that the museum limits how many people are inside the building at once. On a busy day as many as twenty thousand people want to visit, but the building safely holds about five thousand at a time, so every ticket is tied to a fixed entry window bought in advance. To spread that demand out, opening hours stretch as early as seven in the morning and, on the busiest days, as late as one in the morning. We got our tickets for 7am.

What keeps a layout this size running is a control centre on the fourth floor, visible to visitors through the signs marked Leitstand. Real staff sit at the monitors here and run the exhibit as it operates, not as a fixed recording. A wall of screens shows live video from cameras mounted around the layout, including cameras low enough to put a viewer at train height, watching the track ahead the way an engineer would. The same feeds let a controller raise a bridge, land a model aircraft, or adjust the tide in the Scandinavian harbour section, in real time, while visitors in the room watch it happen from the same picture the controller is using.

We walked through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and the United States before the layout brought us into a small scale Hamburg, a version of the city built at roughly 1 to 900 scale. A covered footbridge then carries visitors over one of the Speicherstadt canals into a separate building added for South America, built together with a family of model makers named Martinez working out of Buenos Aires. It holds a working Rio Carnival, a Patagonia section with the Andes and the Perito Moreno glacier, a modelled Drake Passage with waves and swell mechanics, and an Antarctica set.

Construction sites stay visible behind glass throughout the building. The founders wanted visitors to see the model being built, not only the finished result, and further sections, including the Amazon rainforest and the Andes, are still being added.

We left Miniatur Wunderland and walked a few streets over, to Kaispeicher B, Hamburg’s oldest surviving warehouse.

International Maritime Museum

Kaispeicher B is a brick warehouse finished in 1878 or 1879, in a neo Gothic style, built with a frame of wood and steel columns carrying brick outer walls. It was built to store grain and general cargo. The City of Hamburg bought it in 1890, and it stayed a working warehouse until the end of 2003. It is now the oldest protected warehouse building in the port, and since 2008 it has held the International Maritime Museum across roughly twelve thousand square metres of exhibition space, spread over nine floors that the museum calls decks.

The collection belongs to Peter Tamm, a Hamburg publisher who began collecting model ships as a child and kept collecting for the rest of his life. It holds around one hundred thousand objects in total, including tens of thousands of ship models, roughly one million photographs, paintings, uniforms, weapons, and navigation instruments, making it the largest private maritime collection in the world.

Deck one covers navigation, with compasses, astrolabes, and sextants, plus a bridge simulator and a Lego model of the Queen Mary 2 built from nearly a million bricks. Deck two traces sailing ships from antiquity to the twentieth century. Deck three covers shipbuilding, deck four is an armoury of naval uniforms and weapons, and deck five covers world naval history since 1815. Deck six turns to modern cargo and passenger shipping, deck seven to ocean science, and deck eight to marine painting and a treasure chamber of rare objects. Deck nine holds tens of thousands of miniature ship models, some only a few millimetres long.

We moved deck by deck, front to back, and the building itself, still carrying the timber and steel of its original construction inside the brick shell, stayed as much a part of what we were looking at as anything in the cases.

From the Maritime Museum we crossed into HafenCity, Hamburg’s newer harbourside district built on former dockland, to a smaller museum with a very different subject.

Automuseum Prototyp

Automuseum Prototyp is a car museum in a converted red brick industrial building from 1902 to 1906, in HafenCity a short walk from the Maritime Museum. It opened in April 2008 and holds around fifty rare sports and racing cars from more than eighty years of automotive history, shown without barriers or glass so visitors can see them up close. One of the cars on display is a Porsche Type 64 from 1939, one of only two surviving cars from a batch of three built for a propaganda race between Berlin and Rome. Another is the Jordan 191 Formula One car that Michael Schumacher drove in his first Grand Prix, in 1991.

This was a short stop for us, a single floor of cars taken in fairly quickly on the way toward the old city centre.

St. Nikolai Memorial

St. Nikolai is a church with no nave left standing. What remains today is the spire and a stretch of outer wall, kept as a memorial rather than rebuilt. A chapel dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, first stood on this spot in the twelfth century. That building burned down in May 1842, in a fire that started in a warehouse on Deichstraße and spread for three days through the old city centre, then still built mostly of closely packed timber framed houses. The fire destroyed roughly a third of Hamburg, including the town hall and several other churches, and left about twenty thousand people homeless.. A new church was built in its place, designed in a neo Gothic style by the English architect George Gilbert Scott. Construction ran from 1846 to 1874, and the finished spire, at a hundred and forty seven metres, made St. Nikolai briefly the tallest building in the world. It held that record for two years, until Rouen Cathedral in France passed it.

In the last week of July 1943, Allied bombers carried out a series of raids on Hamburg known as Operation Gomorrah. St. Nikolai’s tower had been used by the bomber crews as a landmark for navigation, and the church was largely destroyed in the raids, along with most of the surrounding city. Sources give different totals for how many people died across the whole bombing campaign, ranging from about thirty four thousand to thirty seven thousand. The exact number is not settled. After the war, the ruined nave was cleared rather than rebuilt, and the site was formally dedicated as a memorial in 1977.

A glass lift now runs up inside the surviving tower, to a viewing platform seventy six metres above the street. A museum in the crypt below tells the history of the church and the bombing side by side. We went up the tower first, then down into the crypt. It was the one stop of the day that stayed with us after we left it.

From St. Nikolai we walked back toward the water, into the district the whole day had been circling.

The Speicherstadt

The Speicherstadt is the warehouse district that holds Miniatur Wunderland and the Maritime Museum, and much of the port history the day had already touched on. It was built between 1883 and 1927, on more than three hundred thousand oak piles driven into marshy ground at the edge of the River Elbe. Construction began the same year Hamburg joined the German Customs Union. The city needed a place where goods could be stored and traded without paying customs duty, so the district was built as its own separate zone, walled off from the rest of the city by law until as recently as 2013.

Fifteen large warehouse blocks and six smaller buildings were built in a consistent neo Gothic red brick style, cut through by narrow canals and connected by bridges, covering around twenty six hectares. Coffee, tea, spices, and oriental carpets were among the goods stored inside for over a century. Operation Gomorrah, the same 1943 bombing campaign that destroyed St. Nikolai, also destroyed the western part of the Speicherstadt, and that section was rebuilt after the war.

In 2015 the Speicherstadt and the neighbouring Kontorhaus office district, including the Chilehaus building, were together named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Germany’s fortieth. We walked the canal paths as the light dropped, past the same brick walls that had held Miniatur Wunderland’s trains and Peter Tamm’s model ships earlier in the day.