Stockholm

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Stockholms slott 1,500 points

  Four fronts, and no two of them agree. Go all the way round rather than stopping at the first one. On the north side the ramp comes up past the lions, on the south the slope drops away to the water, and the outer courtyard counts as a street in this level. There are dots on it. A courtyard I am allowed to eat is a rare thing.

• Riddarholmskyrkan 500 points

  Cross the little bridge west and the noise simply stops. The openwork iron spire over there is the sharpest edge on the whole skyline, and once you have seen it up close you will start picking it out from half the lanes on the other side. Take Birger Jarls Torg while you are over there. The quiet is worth a detour on its own.

• Riksdagshuset 500 points

  It curves. Stand on the bridge at the north end of the level and follow the long front around as it bends with the water. Then walk between its two halves: a street runs right through the gap, under the arch that joins them, and a street with a roof over it is my favourite kind of leftover. Riksgatan and Riksplan are both on your route.

• Storkyrkan 500 points

  The high point of the ridge, and it wears two faces. From the west it is a smooth plastered box that keeps its age quiet. Come at it up Slottsbacken instead and the east end gives you bare brick and a big gable, which is what the rest of it is made of under the render. Storkyrkobrinken climbs to it. Everything on this island climbs to it.

• Den Gyldene Freden 250 points

  The lane it opens onto used to be the waterline. The door is small and set back and you can walk straight past it, which most of the street does. Behind it the rooms go down into vaults and back into the rock further than the front will admit. Of everything I take on this island, this is the only stop that counts as a sit-down.

• Nobelprismuseet 250 points

  The square it opens onto is the oldest clear space on the island and the only place here where the lanes stop pressing in on you. Take the well in the middle as your marker, put your back to the door, and count the gabled fronts opposite. Then look down: this is the widest stretch of paving you will get all day.

• Riddarhuset 250 points

  It stands free on all four sides, which on this island is almost showing off. Everything else here is wedged against a neighbour. Walk right round it, take the water side last, and look at the roof: it steps in halfway up, in copper gone green, and then thinks better of it and steps out again.

• Tessinska palatset 250 points

  One of the narrowest fronts on Slottsbacken, and the most worked over. Stop at the door surround and count how little frontage the thing actually gets, then look up the slope behind it, because the good part is a terraced garden climbing out of sight. Narrow to the street, deep to the back. That is how every site on this hill is cut, done here by somebody who could afford to make a point of it.

• Tyska kyrkan 250 points

  Four street names here carry its name before you ever catch sight of the thing: Tyska Brinken, Tyska Skolgränd, Tyska Stallplan, Tyska Brunnsplan. The building itself hides in the block behind them, and you get in through a gate off Svartmangatan, not off a square. Slow down on that stretch. It is easy to walk the whole lane and miss what the lane is named after.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

One islet, and the only sailable link between the open sea and Lake Mälaren went past it. Down the middle of it runs a steep ridge, which is convenient if you would rather not be visited. The land was still rising out of the water, so towards the end of the viking age the channels on both sides ran harder and harder, and a ship heading upstream gave up and unloaded here instead. They called this place the lock on Mälaren. A lock opens for a fee, and fees build a town. Walk the ridge and the whole argument is under your feet.

Sources: vaxer.stockholm p. 21, stockholmskallan.stockholm.se

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

1252–1290

Birger Jarl and his sons. Jarl was a job, not a name: the king's closest adviser. He turns up in that first letter alongside his son, King Valdemar, and at the start of the same decade he and the German town of Lübeck agreed that trade between the Hansa and Sweden would run through here, the merchants getting privileges in return for keeping Swedish law. It worked fast. By the end of the century this was the largest town in Sweden. His other son Magnus took the crown after Valdemar and was buried here in 1290, the first king to be. That is the moment a town starts turning into a capital.

Sources: stockholmskallan.stockholm.se

1600–1700

The century Sweden was a great power, and the city was told to look like one. The order of the day was a modern Stockholm, the equal of any capital in Europe: straight streets and right-angled blocks, laid over the crooked old net on the shores across the water. What that century left on this island is the outer ring. The quay row down the east side, the two Nygatan blocks down the west, the palace ground at the north end. Everything inside the ring is older than everything on it, and you can hear the change in the paving.

Sources: vaxer.stockholm p. 21, vaxer.stockholm p. 16

1980–

A planning document runs this island now. Gamla stan sits on forty-four older detailed plans plus a supplement from 1980 that turned the whole quarter into a cultural reserve, and what has to survive is written out as a list: a small-scale street net that follows the ground, narrow deep plots, medieval brickwork inside the walls, lime-plastered fronts, doors and windows and ornament as one picture, and the paving, in set stone and cobble. Somebody sat down and put the paving under protection. I waited six hundred years for that sentence.

Sources: vaxer.stockholm p. 22

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The plan is a fishbone, and the heritage board says so in the protection order. Big irregular blocks sit inside the two long streets, and off them the later medieval lanes drop straight down to the water, thin and packed close, one after another after another. Rib pattern is the official term for it. Start at the top of the ridge and work down one side, and the island serves its lanes to you in strips.

   Sources: vaxer.stockholm p. 16

2. There was a wall around all of this, and you will walk its line without seeing a stone of it. The first one ran just above Västerlånggatan and Österlånggatan. In the 1300s the townspeople put up a bigger one in brick, about six metres high, and out in the water there was a fence of timber piles as well. The lot of it came down in the 1600s, and of that first wall nothing shows today. So the two long streets are the wall. They are also the two best streets on the island, which is not a coincidence.

   Sources: stockholmskallan.stockholm.se, stockholmskallan.stockholm.se

3. What left this quay was iron, copper, butter, lard, hides, furs, dried fish and train oil. What came the other way was salt, dug mostly out of the Lüneburg mines, and salt was the whole point: no salt, no keeping meat or fish through a northern winter. The squares still carry the cargo in their names. Järntorget took the iron, Kornhamnstorg was the grain harbour, Köpmangatan and Köpmantorget belonged to the merchants. I like a town that labels its own larder.

   Sources: stockholmskallan.stockholm.se

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 112streets
• 1,047dots
• 16.0km of street
• 20.3km on foot
• 5.8hours at a stroll