Current Time in Hamburg-Nord, Germany

Hamburg-Nord is one of the seven boroughs of Hamburg, Germany's second largest city, occupying the ground immediately north of the Outer Alster lake and stretching towards the city's northern boundary. It is a district of tree-lined canals, brick apartment blocks, allotment gardens and quiet residential streets, and it gathers thirteen distinct quarters including Winterhude, Eppendorf, Barmbek, Uhlenhorst, Ohlsdorf, Alsterdorf and Langenhorn.

Around three hundred and twenty thousand people live here, which would make it a sizeable city in its own right. Its importance within Hamburg is considerable: it contains the international airport, one of the largest hospitals in Europe, the city's biggest park and a growing concentration of media, health care and technology employers, alongside some of the most desirable residential addresses in northern Germany.

The area was farmland and marsh outside the walls of the Hanseatic city for most of its history, dotted with villages whose names survive as quarter names today. Wealthy merchants built summer villas along the Alster in the nineteenth century, and after Hamburg's great fire and cholera epidemic the city expanded rapidly northwards. The most formative period came in the 1920s, when the chief city architect Fritz Schumacher laid out planned housing estates of dark clinker brick, of which the Jarrestadt in Winterhude is the finest example and a landmark of European modernist housing. The district suffered devastating damage in the bombing raids of 1943, particularly in Barmbek, and was rebuilt in the following decades.

The Stadtpark is the green heart of the borough, an enormous landscape park designed before the First World War, with a great meadow, a swimming lake and a planetarium housed in a former water tower, which is one of the most popular in the world. Ohlsdorf Cemetery, laid out as a park, is the largest cemetery of its kind anywhere, covering nearly four square kilometres of woodland, ponds and sculpture crossed by its own bus routes. Along the Alster and the Goldbek and Osterbek canals, cafés and boat hire points make summer evenings memorable, and the shoreline walk around the lake is a Hamburg institution.

Cultural life is strong. Kampnagel, a former crane factory in Winterhude, is one of Germany's leading venues for contemporary theatre and dance, and the Museum der Arbeit in Barmbek tells the story of work and industry. Eppendorf and Winterhude are known for boutiques, restaurants and a lively weekly market, while Barmbek and Dulsberg keep a more working-class character and a multicultural mix of shops and restaurants.

Transport is excellent. Underground lines U1 and U3 and several S-Bahn lines cross the borough, and Hamburg Airport at Fuhlsbüttel, in operation since 1911 and among the oldest airports still working anywhere, sits within its boundaries. The University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf is a major teaching hospital and research institution.

Hamburg-Nord offers visitors the everyday, green and comfortable side of Hamburg, a short ride from the harbour but a world away in atmosphere.