Imagine, for a moment, that you’re standing in perhaps the only square in Hamburg which remained intact after the Second World War. It’s a goodly sized square with a statue in the centre and lofty trees marking its edges. There are handsome buildings, built in the 1800’s, on two sides of the square and those on the other two sides, erected in the last half century, may not blend but they aren’t too awful. One, in fact, has a rather pleasing symmetry about it.

In the last decade, however, what wasn’t smashed by allied bombers has been destroyed by private enterprise; namely, a pissoir has been installed in the square. Not a super-duper one mark you, but one made up of three sheets of metal with a grate underneath. Last year, for reasons of modesty, a fourth sheet of metal was added and christened (on the outside) within minutes of its installation. Attempts to interest the authorities in the removal of this anachronism have led to an interesting standoff. The town’s sanitary engineers won’t take responsibility for it because its not connected to a sewer (shock, horror) while the parks department claims that public urinals are the responsibility of the sanitation department.

The flat which my husband and I bought two years ago and are restoring overlooks this square and we have a perfect view of the pissoir from our dining room. There isn’t a minute of the day, ladies, when it’s not being used.

The square, Hansaplatz, and its pissoir demonstrate perfectly how St. Georg, in which they are situated, seems to have been deliberately vandalised. The area has everything: lovely old buildings and streets, most of the city’s hotels, including The Atlantic, the Alster only minutes away in one direction and the town shopping centre in another, so why was it allowed to go to rack and ruin?

Just a few years ago Lange Reihe, the area’s main street, was a hangout for drug addicts and nearby Bremer Reihe still is. Matters won’t be improved when a large centre for drug addicts is opened behind the Museum für Kunst and Gewerbe, replacing three others in surrounding areas and drawing Hamburg’s users into a large, unsavory crowd.

So what is it like living here? Well, if you can overlook the aforementioned unsavories, there’s an interesting mix of people, including a sizeable Turkish, Iranian and gay community, and heaps of people like us, who are trying to gentrify a fascinating area of Hamburg. We are doing this because it’s such a convenient place to live with everything this lovely city has to offer on the doorstep. It’s great to walk to the main shopping streets without having to worry about parking the car and to have the “Alster Great Park” to explore when the weather is kind. Shopping on the Lange Reihe allows me to have English teabags, Iranian cookies; Turkish bread and Italian antipasti in my shopping bag in the space of five minutes and a handmade piece of clothing or jewelry can be had in another five; this makes it a great place to do your Christmas shopping.
There’s an equally diverse range of restaurants, including the oldest one in the city (Zur Alten Flöte, since 1661) and a shiny new one, opened in the last few months, which is a shrine to minimalism, nouvelle cuisine and expensive prices. Up until about a year ago, oh happy days, you could walk to the City cinema and watch a movie in English; it was cheap, always packed and it should never have been closed.