City Hall Square & Copenhagen City Hall

Notice how much space there is around you. In Copenhagen that is unusual, and there is a reason for it. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the city was squeezed in behind its ramparts, and building in stone outside the walls was forbidden, in case an enemy should use the houses for cover. People lived on top of each other in streets you can still walk down, some of them barely two metres wide. When the ramparts came down from 1856, it was like opening a window in a room that had been shut for three hundred years. This square is the first breath the city took. The City Hall was inaugurated in 1905. Look up at the balcony and you will find Bishop Absalon in gold, the man who founded the city. But the best story is inside. A locksmith named Jens Olsen spent much of his life calculating an astronomical clock. He never saw it run. He died in 1945, ten years before it was finished, and it was King Frederik IX who set it going in December 1955. The clock is still running. Its slowest gear takes 25,753 years to complete one single revolution, so the last time it sat where it sits now, northern Europe was under ice.