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Stockholm · 2022

2022 Stockholm

28 August 2022

Passengers with backpacks stream through a busy airport hall beneath blue directional signs
A line of Lufthansa aircraft rests at the gates under a bright blue sky An open expanse of concrete taxiways and dry grass lies beneath a cloudless sky A Lufthansa Technik service cart sits beside an open aircraft panel as a worker attends the jet A line of Lufthansa narrow-body aircraft lines the terminal beyond the plane's wingtip Grassy airfield and an airport control tower spread out beyond the aircraft engine A gravel walkway winds between rows of tall green trees beside a city road. Pink and orange townhouse facades frame a quiet street with a parked car. Red brick apartment blocks with balconies line a calm street of parked cars. White and blue signs point the way to ferries for Finland, Riga and St Petersburg. Red hop-on hop-off buses wait in a car park beneath a tower over the trees. A long orange warehouse sits beneath rows of tall concrete grain silos. An ornate yellow corner building dominates a busy crossing with cycle lanes. The stone facade and twin spires of the Nordic Museum rise behind leafy trees. A gilded copper spire rises above an ornate historic building. A contemporary building is framed by three towering red ship masts. Two colourful music-festival posters hang on a board by the water. Tall sailing ships rest at quiet wooden piers along the waterfront. The bright red lightship Finngrundet glows in the harbor sunshine. A small grey wooden launch floats quietly beside the boarding ramp. A dark steamship stands tall at the pier with its white deckhouse. An orange-hulled wooden ship rests among the white boats of the marina. The black Spritmuseum sign rises from tall grass and summer wildflowers. The Viking Museum sign hangs over a runestone beside a mustard-yellow building. Across calm blue water, red-brick and yellow buildings line the waterfront. A stately red-brick building with green copper roofs crowns a wooded hill. A red-and-white ferry crosses the water in front of a hillside of apartments. A big leafy tree and old stone quay frame a distant city skyline across the water. Red-brick buildings and new apartment blocks line the waterfront beneath tower cranes. A white yacht drifts beside a skyline of brick buildings, cranes and a curved bridge. A dark wood-shingled historic house with dormers stands among big trees on a sunny lawn behind a low post-and-rail fence. A lamppost-lit gravel path winds between a grassy lawn and a lake, with apartments visible across the water. A bronze statue on a pedestal sits amid purple flowers, framed by a green hedge arch and a pink palace behind. A sleek white steel arch bridge crosses the water, viewed from a weathered wooden pier under forested hills. A red and white Viking Line ship glides across blue water toward forested islands under a clear sky. A gravel path lined with trees follows a reed-fringed canal, with a runner in the distance and benches along the way. A tall concrete telecom tower with stacked viewing decks and an antenna mast overlooks a tree-lined road. A large sage-green wooden villa with a maroon roof and balcony rises behind a wooden picket fence. A warm hotel studio with a messy bed, wall-mounted TV, and small kitchen. A gravel lakeside path leads past a wooden jetty toward a tall tower. A decorated old building glows in golden light beside a spiraled chimney. Sunbeams cut through tall trees over a green lawn and gravel path. An ornate yellow circus building with a glass pavilion glows in warm light. A pale pillared villa stands behind a picket fence among green trees. A wooden deck with a mesh railing overlooks a glowing sunset over water. A broad river reflects the low sun and a distant city skyline. A solar pillar glows above a calm river at dusk. A luminous vertical column of light rises from the horizon. Warm evening light spills over a river fringed by dark trees. Boxed drinking-bird and storm-glass toys sit on a blue shelf. A dirt trail runs through a green field toward the setting sun. Green fields spread out under a dusk sky streaked with contrails. A huge wooden sailing warship stands preserved inside a museum. A rigged warship dominates the hall with a model sailboat below. Intricately carved wooden soldiers line the high stern of a preserved ship. Open gun ports and scarred planking stretch along the side of the old ship. A thick rope cuts diagonally across a dark ship opening toward a bright window. Line upon line of carved figures decorate the stern below tall masts and rigging. Two long rows of carved wooden statues stand along the ship's upper deck. Carved warriors holding shields decorate the stern as rigging climbs above. A towering stern stack of carved decks and statues rises toward the museum ceiling. Detailed carvings of soldiers and cherubs decorate the ship's decorated stern panel. A vast wooden warship looms beneath the dim lights of a cavernous museum hall. Dozens of wooden statues stand shoulder to shoulder along a warship's brightly lit stern. Two carved lions flank a crowned king's crest high on a warship's stern. A line of carved guards and cherubs decorates the warship's stern gallery. A fierce carved wooden mask with open mouth and staring eyes looks down. A crowned figure sits flanked by roaring lions carved into a warship's beam. Carved statues stand in a row along the balustrade of a ship's stern castle. A web of ropes, rigging and deadeyes spans the warship's masts. Weathered wooden warship deck rises through a cavernous concrete museum hall. An arched carved doorway sits amid tightly strung rigging and worn wooden stairs. A carved wooden look-out platform crowns a mast, set against bare concrete. The dark interior ribs and planks of an old hull lie revealed beneath heavy ropes. Carved galleries and gilded stern windows rise over a deck crowded with masts and rigging. From the walkway the carved stern tower and its rigging loom over the museum floor. Rows of deadeyes and carved railings line the hull above a line of gun ports. A polished brass steering wheel and engine telegraph sit in a sunlit wooden bridge. Bulky green-painted engines and pipework fill a dim, cramped ship engine room. Thick pipes and pale pressure vessels weave between green engine frames. Green machines and white-housed units stand beneath metal walkways. Green connecting rods and crank arms fill a low-angle close-up of the engine. Brass valves, handwheels, and a silver tank line the riveted bulkhead. Dial gauges and coiled ropes hang along the shadowed engine-room wall. A ladder, red fire extinguisher, and gauged door panel crowd the workshop corner. Copper, white, and red pipes cross the cluttered machinery space with its gauges. Perforated boiler tube plates behind an electric pump in a ship engine room. A riveted metal panel marked 3 and a warnings label among pipes and valves. A line of round machinery fronts fitted with red handwheels and gauge plates. Machinery faces and valve wheels crowd a narrow engine-room aisle. A brass ship telegraph bearing the maker Chadburn's and orders written in Swedish. Four brass pressure dials mounted on a wooden gauge board amid green machinery. A red faceplate of the Ray Oil Burner Co carrying oil, steam and exhaust gauges. Round machinery caps and pipework seen from above on a green engine floor. Green industrial machinery, pipes, and a large valve wheel fill a dim engine room. The black-hulled steamship Sankt Erik lies docked at a wooden pier under a bright blue sky. Grey-hulled boats and striped flags crowd a busy harbor on a cloudy day. A tight white corridor with open wooden doors and a ladder leads below deck. A plaid-covered dining table, a bowl of red apples, and round portholes fill the ship's mess room. A narrow bunk, small wall table, and porthole make up a sailor's small cabin. A long passageway opens onto a narrow wooden staircase climbing between cream walls. A long, glossy corridor of cabin doors stretches toward a round window at the far end. A sunlit gravel path winds between dense green trees alongside calm water. Reeds frame a calm harbor backed by trees, boats and a distant town. Ducks drift across rippling water while one stands on a rocky shore. A mother goose leads three fluffy goslings in a line across the water. A dark motor yacht is moored among dozens of boats in a crowded marina. A white AIDA cruise ship with a blue stripe sits docked in the harbor. A cruise ship crosses the water before a skyline crowned by a domed spire. A wooden jetty and ducks sit before open water and a distant red ship. A tree-lined park borders calm blue water where a white ferry glides past. Rows of olive oil bottles fill store shelves beneath price tags.
Journal Notes

General

Stockholm is the capital and most populous city of Sweden and the largest urban area in the Nordic countries. About one million people live in the municipality, 1.6 million in the urban area and 2.5 million in the metropolitan area, and the city serves as the seat of Stockholm County. It stretches across fourteen islands at the point where Lake Mälaren flows into the Baltic Sea, and outside it, to the east and along the coast, lies the island chain of the Stockholm archipelago.

The area has been settled since the Stone Age, in the sixth millennium BC, and Stockholm was founded as a city in 1252 by the Swedish statesman Birger Jarl. It is the cultural, media, political and economic centre of the country, and the Stockholm region alone accounts for over a third of Sweden’s gross domestic product and ranks among the ten European regions with the highest product per head. The city is classified as an Alpha minus world city, the largest in Scandinavia.

The city carries several of the country’s institutions and ceremonies. It hosts the annual Nobel Prize ceremonies in the Stockholm Concert Hall and the banquet that follows in the Stockholm City Hall, and it is home to several of the highest ranking universities of Europe, among them the Karolinska Institute for medicine and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The Vasa Museum is the most visited museum in Scandinavia, and the metro, opened in 1950, is known for the decoration of its stations and has been called the longest art gallery in the world.

The water is what gives the city its shape. Lake Mälaren is the third largest freshwater lake in Sweden after Vänern and Vättern, covers 1,140 square kilometres, reaches a depth of 64 metres and spans 120 kilometres from east to west. It drains from the south west to the north east into the Baltic Sea through its natural outlets Norrström and Söderström as it flows around the island of Stadsholmen, and through the artificial Södertälje Canal and the Hammarbyleden waterway. Its easternmost bay in central Stockholm is called Riddarfjärden, and the lake itself lies in Svealand between the provinces of Uppland, Södermanland and Västmanland.

The climate of Stockholm is humid continental in the zero degree isotherm and borders on an oceanic climate in the minus three degree isotherm, so that winters are cold while average temperatures stay above freezing for much of the year and summers are pleasantly warm, with precipitation throughout. Because of the high northerly latitude the length of the day varies enormously, from more than eighteen hours around midsummer to only about six in late December, and the nights from late May until mid-July are never completely dark even when the sky is cloudy. With about 1,900 hours of sunshine a year the city is one of the sunniest in northern Europe, and it has the warmest July of the Nordic capitals.

History

The place appears in the Norse sagas as Agnafit and in Heimskringla in connection with the legendary king Agne, and the trading centre of Birka, active from about 790 to 975 and lying near the later city, was one of the major ports of the Viking Age. Sigtuna, which still exists, dominated the region from about 1000 to 1240, and Stockholm can be understood as the capital of that lake district, moved once more to a better position. The name is usually read as log islet, after the log booms driven into the strait north of the present old town that dendrochronological examinations in the late 1970s dated to around the year 1000; the first part may equally come from an older German word meaning fortification, and the second part means islet.

The name Stockholm first appears in documents in letters written by Birger Jarl and King Valdemar in 1252, and German merchants invited by Birger Jarl played an important part in the foundation. There was no regular town plan, which suggests a settlement that grew of its own accord, and according to the chronicle of Erik the city was founded to protect Sweden against seaborne raids from the east after Sigtuna had been plundered in 1187. By the end of the thirteenth century Stockholm had become the largest city in Sweden as well as its political centre and royal residence, and it has remained the largest and most important Swedish city ever since.

Gamla stan, the old town, was for centuries the whole of the city. It consists mainly of the island of Stadsholmen together with the surrounding islets of Riddarholmen, Helgeandsholmen and Strömsborg, and it was officially called Staden mellan broarna, the town between the bridges, until 1980. Its approximately 3,000 inhabitants live among buildings that shaped the history of Swedish architecture, among them the royal palace, the Parliament House, the Tessin Palace, the Stock Exchange building, the Bonde Palace, now the seat of the Supreme Court, and the House of Nobility, which housed the parliament for many years.

Under Gustav Vasa and his sons the city lost much of the independence it had enjoyed in the Middle Ages. The king restored the privileges of Stockholm after his siege of the town, but kept control of the elections of aldermen and magistrates, and the council remained escorted by a royal representative; the number of officials grew so that the management of the city became more professional. Gustav Vasa invited the clergyman Olaus Petri to become city secretary, and with the two working side by side the ideas of the Protestant Reformation were introduced quickly and sermons were held in Swedish.

The seventeenth and nineteenth centuries reshaped the town again. After the Thirty Years’ War Sweden was determined not to repeat the embarrassment of a capital that still looked medieval, and ambitious city plans were drawn for the ridges around the old town; Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna wrote in 1636 that developing the capital was a precondition of the nation’s strength. In the second half of the nineteenth century Stockholm regained its leading economic role, some 800 new buildings went up between 1850 and 1870, gas works, sewers and running water arrived, streets such as Skeppsbron and Strandvägen were paved and the railway connected the city to the continent. In the twentieth century the inner city of Norrmalm went through the celebrated and criticised redevelopment that secured the geographical centre as the political and business centre, the municipal government moved into the newly built City Hall in 1923, the Stockholm International Exhibition followed in 1930, and in 1967 the city was integrated into Stockholm County.

Geology

The bedrock under Stockholm belongs to the Baltic Shield, also called the Fennoscandian Shield, a segment of the Earth’s crust that forms part of the East European Craton and covers a large part of Fennoscandia, north western Russia and the northern Baltic Sea. It consists mostly of Archean and Proterozoic gneisses and greenstone, it contains the oldest rocks of the European continent, and its crust is 250 to 300 kilometres thick. The shield is divided into five provinces, of which the Svecofennian province underlies the region around Stockholm.

The visible consequence of that history is granite, and lots of it. The landscape of the archipelago and of the city’s own shores is a granite landscape of bare rock, polished surfaces, fissures and low, rounded hills, and the same stone appears in the walls of the older buildings of the old town. Where the ice and the sea have worked on the joints of the rock, the result is the pattern of islands, skerries and channels that makes navigation in these waters so demanding and the views so distinctive.

The land here is still rising. During the last glacial period northern Europe was covered by an ice sheet up to three kilometres thick, whose weight depressed the crust, and since the ice retreated the surface has been rising again in a process known as post-glacial rebound or isostatic rebound. It proceeded by slow viscous flow at an exponentially decreasing rate, and typical uplift rates today are of the order of one centimetre per year or less, which is clearly shown by satellite measurements in northern Europe. Over the centuries this uplift has moved shorelines and settlement sites, and place names far inland still record positions that once lay on the water.

The Baltic Sea into which the lake drains is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean with a brackish character, fed by a large catchment and exchanging water only slowly through the Danish straits. Its topography and hydrography, with deep basins separated by shallow sills and a pronounced layering of salt and fresh water, control the oxygen and nutrient conditions of the whole region. That is why the sea reacts so sensitively to the nutrient loads of its catchment, and why its condition is a permanent subject of environmental policy in every country on its shores.

Lake Mälaren itself is a regulated water body whose level is managed to balance the interests of navigation, water supply, drainage and the shoreline, and its relation to the Baltic has been studied for a long time. Together with the smaller lakes, the canals and the many kilometres of shoreline inside the city, the lake gives Stockholm a water geography that is unusual for a capital: fresh water and brackish water meet within the built-up area.

Things to See

Most journeys to Stockholm begin at the airport outside the city, on the flat land of the Mälaren valley, and continue by the fast rail link into the centre. The first impression from the train or the road is of rock, water and forest in quick succession, with wooden and brick apartment blocks beside gravel paths, and of a city whose edges are never far from a shore.

The old town remains the heart of the visit. Gamla stan occupies the island of Stadsholmen and the islets around it, with the royal palace, the Parliament House and the House of Nobility standing within a few minutes of each other, and the narrow streets between them still following the irregular lines of a town that grew without a plan. The Stockholm Palace, or Royal Palace, is the official residence of the monarch and has stood in the same place by the Norrström since the thirteenth century; the king and queen use Drottningholm Palace as their usual residence, but the offices of the court and the representative rooms of the monarchy are here.

Djurgården, the island to the east of the centre, is one of the favourite recreation areas of the city and, for visitors, one of its principal destinations. It has belonged to the Swedish monarch since the fifteenth century and carries historical buildings and monuments, museums and galleries, the amusement park Gröna Lund, the open-air museum Skansen, small residential quarters, yacht harbours and long stretches of forest and meadow. The island attracts over ten million visitors a year, about half of them for the museums and the amusement park, and since 1995 it has formed part of the National City Park.

Skansen on Djurgården is the oldest open-air museum and zoo in Sweden. It was opened on 11 October 1891 by Artur Hazelius to show how people lived in the different parts of the country before industrialisation, at a time when the rural way of life was disappearing quickly. The name has become a generic term for open-air museums and collections of historic buildings, and for the reconstruction of vanished ways of life, far beyond Sweden.

The Vasa Museum on Djurgården displays the ship that gives it its name, the only almost fully intact warship of the seventeenth century ever salvaged. Vasa was built between 1626 and 1628 and sank after sailing roughly 1,300 metres into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628, whereupon she fell into obscurity once her bronze cannon had been lifted; she was rediscovered in the late 1950s, salvaged in 1961 after 333 years on the seabed and treated with polyethylene glycol, and after a stay in the temporary Wasavarvet building until 1988 she was moved into the museum that opened in 1990. Between her recovery and the beginning of 2025 the ship has been seen by over 45 million visitors, and the museum is the most visited in Scandinavia.

The ship is the reason for the visit, but the carving is what stays in the memory. The stern carries tier upon tier of carved figures, soldiers and cherubs and lions around a crowned crest, the gun ports open along a hull whose planking still bears the marks of three centuries under water, and from the walkways around the hall the rigging cuts across the concrete of the building. In the old hall visitors could only look at the ship from two levels and from a distance of five metres, and the present arrangement, with several levels and the vessel filling the space from floor to roof, is the result of the competition and planning that produced the museum of 1990.

The City Hall stands on the eastern tip of the island of Kungsholmen beside the northern shore of Riddarfjärden, facing the islands of Riddarholmen and Södermalm, and holds both the offices of the municipality and its ceremonial halls. It is the venue of the Nobel banquet. The council decided in 1907 to build a new city hall on the site of the former Eldkvarn mill, held a competition that was decided in favour of Ragnar Östberg, and the municipal government moved into the finished building in 1923.

Beyond the last of the city islands begins the archipelago, the largest in Sweden and the second largest in the Baltic Sea after the Archipelago Sea in Finland. It contains slightly more than 24,000 islands, islets and skerries and covers about 1,700 square kilometres, of which some 530 are land, and part of it has been a Ramsar site since 1989. Around 10,000 people live there permanently and some 50,000 holiday homes stand on its shores; the islands closest to the coast, among them Vaxholm, Ingarö and Värmdö, are reached by road ferries and bridges, while the larger islands further out are served by passenger ships. Boat trips from the city through this water, past rocks, reeds and jetties, are as much a part of a stay in Stockholm as the museums are.

References

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