I am sure you all remember the pain and disappointment of a Hamburg boat tour in January, with a tour entirely in German and only a numbered sheet with serious, unintentionally hilarious translations of sights to be seen.  With our sleeves we removed condensation from the windows as we stared through lashings of rain and vast expanses of containers and industrial shipping — I would have enjoyed those in the sun.

Yesterday was sunny, we had a few hours before the train whisked us off to Linköping. Stockholm is a city built on islands, and I dearly love boats and the ability to enjoy sitting on a boat and get wonderful views of a new city you can obtain in no other way — what could go wrong?

Real estate development, that’s fucking what.

But I shall start with what we enjoyed.

Views of the old city

Splendid, even if viewed somewhat at a distance.

The below were described as allotments set aside for Stockholm’s poor to grow vegetables and enjoy fresh air — I am not at all sure that they continue to have this function, it seems doubtful from how picturesque they are and the lack of needful gardener’s messiness, but I liked them nonetheless

Stockholm’s floating swimming pool — BAD — and bad (ass) it certainly is. An attempt was made to shut it down, but people came together to preserve it.

There was not a mention of social housing in the commentary, but I rather liked these brutalist buildings in their great arcs to provide residents with the best possible views across Lake Mälaren, and I imagine they are (or were) social housing set in great green parks along the waterfront (including playgrounds, which you can see in the foreground) and full of life:

Wonderful. This is Stockholm, a city like no other I have seen.

The weird and wonderful

This grill hidden away, for some precarious baltic-sea adjacent BBQ:

This doesn’t really count, except the bro signal is pretty hilarious for English speakers:

The interesting and industrial

I loved so much this wonderful building:

The long periods of just-the-same-crappy-‘luxury’-flats-built-through-‘regeneration’-on-every-fucking-stretch-of-water-in-the-whole-world

This, in fact, comprised most of the tour. The tour guide had little to say about any of it, so apart from some facts about the Social Democrats, the life expectancy of men being 75 and women 81, that time the bubonic plague hit Stockholm with 1200 people dying a day in a city of 50,000 people and yet it went on for months, that time they tried to win the Olympics to the city and failed (Athens bankrupted themselves to win it instead, but that’s my own commentary) but it meant they did built some interesting housing with solar and using gas from the local sewage treatment plants…a bunch of fun facts and lots of musical intervals (they provided headphones with an array of six languages to choose from).

Occasionally they would get to point out the interesting things that used to be there connected to the docks, before they were all rebuilt with this ‘quality’ and ‘luxury’ housing. Not a mention of an architect, an urban plan, a social vision, just some basic advertising jargon. Heres is one reminder left of the docks that were once here

An array of soul-crushing developments that I am sure I have seen before in Chelsea, in Limehouse, in Chicago, in LA, in Glasgow, in Hamburg…and every god damn city with any history of industry along the waterfront.

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Far be it from me to complain like a middle-class consumer would, but the very expensive ‘Under-the-Bridges’ tour (we went under a few bridges, that was cool) was advertised as being 2 hours 15 minutes, when in fact it was under two hours. That was because we skipped what the materials encouraging you to buy the tour showed as included, but when actually on board were described as the ‘alternative’ loop which would have brought us back into the interesting older part of the city to see it from the other side. Which I would have loved. Of course, going twice past the horrors of modern development meant I was still pretty happy to get off that damn boat. If only it had been late enough in the day to have bought some overpriced alcohol.

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