Copenhagen Central Station

This is Copenhagen's third main station, and the two before it are the reason this one exists.

The first opened in 1847, roughly where the square is now. It was built of timber, and not by choice: this ground was the field of fire outside the city ramparts, and the army would permit only light buildings that could be cleared away if war came. The ramparts came down in 1856, and with them the reason for a wooden station.

The second was J. D. Herholdt's station of 1864, in brick, where Axeltorv meets Vesterbrogade today. It was a good building. It worked for about thirty years, and then it stopped working.

By 1900 the railway had three problems. This building is the answer to all three.

The station had run out of room. Herholdt's was too short, and there was no way to lengthen it. By the 1900s 235 trains a day were being squeezed through the narrow gap between the station and the lakes.

The city's streets were being cut in half. The tracks ran at ground level, so barriers dropped across the streets every few minutes. Copenhagen and Frederiksberg paid a large share of the cost of this station, and what the two councils were buying was not a station at all. They were buying the level crossings gone.

And the railway did not join up. Trains from the north — the Coast Line from Helsingør and the Klampenborg trains — ended on Østerbro. Everything else ended at Herholdt's station on Vesterbro. The two ends lay on opposite sides of the vanished ramparts, close enough to walk between, with nothing at all connecting them. Passengers crossed the city on foot. A train could not: to move a single carriage from one system to the other, the railway sent it out to Valby, around the western edge of the city through Nørrebro, and back in from the north.

The answer to all three was the same. Put the railway underneath the city.

That single decision produced everything else. It is why the tracks here run in a cutting, why the concourse is a bridge over them, and why the building had to be built across its own tracks instead of at the end of them. It even decided the roof.

It took a long time to arrive. Wenck was drawing proposals from 1892. Parliament voted the money in 1904. The doors opened on 1 December 1911, and the tunnel that finally joined the northern railway to this station opened on 1 December 1917 — six years later, to the day.

So the station was finished for a railway that did not yet exist, and built large enough to wait for it.

In between, for roughly twenty-five years, Danish architects built out of what Denmark already had — its medieval brick churches, its manor houses, its ordinary building trade. Not a style anyone travelled to fetch. The one that was already here.

That is why the period matters more than its length suggests, and why the two buildings from it that everyone in Copenhagen can name — the City Hall and this station — are the ones people are thinking of when they say a building looks Danish.

How you recognise it

Six things, and all six are on this building.

The wall is bare brick. Unrendered, unpainted, the brick itself the finished surface. No stucco, no facing, nothing pretending to be stone. What the wall is made of is what you see.

Why this one is the example

Because all of it is here at once, and at a size the style never got again.

Two buildings define the period in Copenhagen. The City Hall, by Martin Nyrop, is one — and it is a building for one city, paid for by that city, saying so. This is the other, and its job was different. It was built by the state, with state money, to stand at the country's front door.

That is exactly why the arms of twelve towns are on the walls and the dress of ten districts is on the front. National Romanticism was asked, once, to speak for the whole of Denmark on a single building, and this is that building. It is why the station belongs in any short list of the most important buildings in the country — not because it is the prettiest or the largest, but because it is the one place where a national style was handed a national subject and had to deliver it at full size.

There is a colour in it too. Swedish red and dark green, the paint Wenck first used on the Coast Line stations in 1897, became his signature across the country, and it is on the platform gables here and on the timber canopies over the street doors. Worth knowing, because it turns up at forty other Danish stations once you have seen it.

And then it stopped. In 1909 ten young architects walked out of Wenck's own drawing office, and one of them, Carl Petersen, gave the lectures that launched Danish neoclassicism and ended the style this building is made of. It was finished within a decade of the doors opening.

So this is not the style at its beginning. It is the style at full size, near the end, doing the largest job it was ever handed.

Heinrich Wenck designed this building, and about a hundred and fifty more. He was chief architect to the Danish State Railways, and what a Danish railway station looks like — the thing the whole country pictures when it hears the word — is largely his invention. Anyone who has travelled in Denmark by train has stood inside his work without knowing whose it was. Fifteen of his stations are protected today.

He was born in Aarhus in 1851, into a German-speaking family from Holstein. He finished school in Kiel in 1866 and came to Copenhagen that same year — two years after the war of 1864 took Holstein away from Denmark. The man who gave Denmark its front door grew up on the wrong side of a border that moved.

Railways were the family trade. His father sat on the 1878 commission on enlarging Copenhagen's station, as the Interior Ministry's technical adviser on railways and a member of the State Railways board until his death. The father sat on the committee that asked what to do about Copenhagen's station; the son built the answer, thirty-three years later.

What makes him unusual is not one building but a hundred and fifty of them. He gave an entire national railway a single handwriting — the same red brick, the same pale banding, the same painted timber — from a country halt with two platforms right up to this. Very few architects anywhere have been handed that, and fewer have stayed consistent with it for thirty years.

He is often paired with Martin Nyrop, who built Copenhagen City Hall six minutes' walk away, as though the two were of a kind. They were not. They were exact contemporaries, and both finished at the Academy in 1876 — but under different masters. By 1906 they led rival camps in the architects' association, their names printed on opposing lists on the same page. Three years later ten young architects walked out of Wenck's own drawing office to found a breakaway association in revolt against Nyrop's — the walkout that would end the style both men had built in.

Two great Copenhagen buildings, the same decade, the same red brick — and their architects on opposite sides of the room.

Parliament voted the money on 29 March 1904, and the doors opened seven and a half years later. In between, the State Railways bought this building in pieces: eighteen separate public tenders between 1906 and 1911. The notices are a dated calendar of how it went up.

The ground had to go down first. The tracks here run in a cutting below street level — and below the city's sewers. That is why the concourse is a bridge. Once the railway is under the city, the building has to be built across its own tracks instead of at the end of them, and a row of piers has to run down the middle of the great hall to carry the deck.

Banegårdspladsen, the square in front of the station, is not ground. It is a reinforced-concrete deck laid over the tracks, 31.4 metres wide and 120 metres long, finished in cast asphalt — and so are Bernstorffsgade and Reventlowsgade down either side. That was new in Denmark in 1906. Everyone crossing to the doors is walking over moving trains.

It fixed one thing permanently. Because the tracks lie below the sewers, the station's rainwater cannot run away by itself. The whole site is drained by small pumping stations, each with an automatic electric pump lifting the water up into the city drains. The price of putting a railway under a city is paid every time it rains.

Rainwater goods are usually the part of a building nobody draws. Here somebody did.

Then the trades, one contract at a time.

The foundations went out to tender on 6 June 1906, and twenty-seven Copenhagen contracting firms bid. The lowest bidder withdrew his tender on the spot.

The bricks were bought that October: 7,850,000 of them for the main building. Eleven brickworks bid. Frederiksholm's works in Copenhagen bid across the whole range, and one Norwegian works bid too.

The masonry drew 46 tenders on 12 April 1907 and went lowest to C. Licht at 569,980 kroner — more than a quarter of the entire main building in a single contract. The carpentry drew 52 tenders on 3 February 1908, lowest to C. Th. Henriksen at 209,416 kroner. The roof went as one contract, plumbing and slating together, lowest to Diehl at 72,276 kroner — thirty-eight per cent under the next man.

Two corners, two years apart. The building was not finished all at once and it does not pretend it was: each corner carries the year the work reached it, which is a quietly honest thing for a facade to do.

Once on every door. ANNO 1911 is cast into the brass plate of every original door, beneath the interlaced DSB monogram and a royal crown.

And once by the men who laid the wall. 1908 is scratched into the soft clay of a single brick, built into the middle of a panel of patterned brickwork. Somebody wrote the year in a brick before it was fired, and it went into the wall and is still in it.

The station was inaugurated on 30 November 1911. The first trains ran the next day.

There is one more inscription, and it is the important one. In the main hall, above an arched opening, a broad sandstone tablet carries seven lines of gilded capitals. It is the building's own account of itself, and it names two kings — one for the law, one for the opening:

In His Majesty King Christian IX's forty-first year of reign the law passed by parliament on Copenhagen's passenger station, 29 March 1904, was confirmed. Roughly on the spot where Copenhagen's first station, opened in 1847, stood, this, Copenhagen's third main station, was built, and taken into use 1 December 1911, in His Majesty King Frederik VIII's sixth year of reign.

Wenck's rule was Danish materials, each one left as itself. This is what that came to in practice.

Red brick, because Denmark is clay. There is no building stone here worth quarrying. Danish churches, manors and farms have been brick since the twelfth century. Choosing red brick was choosing the national material — and laying it bare, with nothing rendered over it, is what made the choice visible from across the square. It stands on a plinth of granite.

The pale bands, because the wall is too big. Five horizontal courses of light natural stone run across the fronts. They are not structure — they are there to cut the wall down to size. A wall this long and this tall in one unbroken red would read as a slab. The bands cut it into layers and give the building storeys it does not have inside.

The white windows, for the same reason. Most of the original windows are still in place, white-painted and divided by glazing bars. White against red, over that many openings, breaks the mass again — this time vertically.

Glazed tile inside, because of shoulders. The stairs and the tunnels are lined in glazed tile: cream with a green band under the platforms, green and brown on the stairs, set in a grid with white joints. Three reasons, all practical. It washes. It throws daylight around a tunnel that has none of its own. And it takes a century of shoulders, luggage and prams without ever being repainted — the wear shows as chips in the glaze, which is a surface ageing rather than a surface failing.

That points at the rule running through the whole building. Every material sits where its own kind of wear is. Tile at arm's reach, where the crowd is. Timber overhead, where nothing touches it. Granite at the plinth, where the wet is. Fired clay underfoot. Almost nothing here was chosen for looks first, which is why so little of it has had to be replaced.

And one material is sent out into the weather on purpose. Over each street entrance a timber canopy reaches out across the pavement — boarded underneath so you see the boards, roofed in metal on top, and carried on brackets that come down onto carved stone blocks. Glass lanterns hang beneath it on chains. It is the first piece of this building most people ever stand under.

Timber in the rain is the one thing the rule above says not to do. It works here because the canopy is painted rather than varnished, in the architect's own dark green with the carved leaves along its edge picked out — and paint is a surface you renew, not a material you replace. The canopies are the part of this station that has to be repainted in order to keep existing. They have been, for a hundred and fifteen years, and that is the whole bargain: choose the cheap material, then accept the brush that comes with it.

The floor. About 7,000 metres of tile went into the main hall, the tunnels, the vestibule and the waiting rooms — fired clay, orange, with dark inserts and incised circles in one repeating pattern. They came from F. Krickhuhn of Jernbanegade 4, who afterwards printed a testimonial signed by Wenck himself.

Fired clay rather than stone, and that was considered. It does not go slick when a hundred thousand wet shoes come in off a Copenhagen street. It is laid in small units, so a worn patch is lifted and replaced instead of the floor being taken up. And it is the same clay as the walls, fired harder.

The State Railways named their sources. Their own account of the works — written by C. J. Carlsen, who ran the drawing office — lists Hasle and Mecklenborg tiles. Hasle is on Bornholm; Mecklenburg is in Germany. For a floor that a hundred thousand people a day would cross, the railway went after the hardest-wearing clinker it could get, and crossed a border for part of it.

Two kinds of ornament, and the difference is money. It is worth noticing what is moulded and what is carved. The bands of leaves and the rows of small flowers along the arches are fired clay — pressed into a mould before firing, so one pattern repeats the whole way along and the ornament came out of the same kiln as the wall. The sandstone is the opposite: cut one at a time, by hand, never repeated.

So the building spends carving where you stand close enough to look — the figures, the heads, the tops of the columns at the door — and spends moulds everywhere else. Nothing is left undecorated, and almost nothing is paid for twice.

Under the arcade, in the wall between the great arched windows, ten figures stand in stone. They are all dressed differently — a man in a wide hat with a long clay pipe, a woman in a bonnet with her hands full, a man with a fowling piece resting butt-down on the ground, another simply holding his hat.

Each one stands on its own name.

Amager. Fanø. Hedebo. Læsø. Mols. Ringkiøbing. Salling. Samsø. Skovshoved. Sydfyen.

Ten districts of Denmark, each wearing what people actually wore there — the local dress, region by region, cut in sandstone. The man with the pipe is Amager. The one with the gun is Salling. The State Railways put the whole country on the front of the country's front door.

They were carved in 1910 by Jens Lund, who signed them: the pier beside the Skovshoved figure reads JENS LUND 1910.

Lund was Wenck's sculptor. He had already cut the granite at Esbjerg station in 1904 and the sandstone at Korsør in 1907, so Copenhagen was his third station front for the same architect in six years. He trained as a woodcarver before he ever touched stone, and it shows in how the folds of cloth are cut — crisp and shallow, more like carving oak than modelling clay.

There is a photograph of him making them. The Royal Library holds a plate dated 3 January 1910: Lund in a sculptor's smock, standing on a small stepladder with a modelling tool in his hand, and behind him one of the figures in wet clay — already set against its own tall narrow panel, the shape of the wall it was going into. More of them wait on stands along the left-hand wall, and small maquettes sit on a shelf.

So the sequence is visible. The figures were modelled full size in clay over the winter, then cut in sandstone, then set in the wall the following year. The man on the stepladder was thirty-six, and had been a house painter and a dairyman before he ever picked up a chisel.

And this is the thing worth carrying through the rest of the building. It talks. Everything here is saying something. The people out front are the country the trains went to. The painted shields further along are the towns. Inside there are Danish animals in the stonework, two engineers over the arches, and a compass on the ceiling that still reports the wind outside.

All of it is there for anyone who stops long enough on the way through.

Set into the brickwork, two to a gable on either side of the great windows, are large circles of shaped brick with a painted shield of fired clay inside each one.

They are Danish town arms, and every one can be named: Copenhagen, Aarhus, Fredericia, Korsør, Kalundborg, Nyborg, Svendborg, Assens, Faaborg, Bogense, Middelfart and Helsingør.

Danish town arms descend from medieval town seals, so the imagery is genuinely old, borrowed and repainted. Bogense is a ship with an anchor slung at the bow and three pennants flying. Assens is the Lamb of God on a flowery meadow. Kalundborg is its five-spired church, which still stands. Aarhus is its two saints, Clemens and Paul, in the town gate above the water.

And now the part that is easy to miss. Every one of the twelve stands on salt water. There is not one inland town on this wall.

The missing name proves it. Odense was Denmark's third city, it sits on Funen, and the main line to Jutland ran straight through it. It is not up there. Neither is Roskilde, Slagelse, Ringsted or Vejle. What is up there is the coast, and only the coast.

Four pairs off into the sea crossings a traveller actually made. Korsør and Nyborg face each other across the Great Belt. Fredericia and Middelfart face each other across the Little Belt. Kalundborg and Aarhus face each other across the Kattegat. Helsingør is the crossing to Sweden. The remaining four — Bogense, Assens, Faaborg, Svendborg — are the other harbours of Funen, each one the end of a branch line that stopped at a quay.

So this is not a map of Denmark. It is a map of where the rails ran out. Every shield marks a place where you got off a train and onto a ship, and that is precisely what crossing this country meant in 1911: train to the water, boat over it, train again on the far side. The station is telling you how far it can take you and where somebody else takes over.

It also explains why Funen gets half the wall. Funen is the island in the middle. Everything has to land on it.

One shield is painted wrong, which is worth knowing before you trust the colours. Fredericia's lion is gold on blue up there; the town's arms are red on gold. Every identification here rests on the figures, never on the paint.

Higher up, on the round corner tower, there is a larger shield: three crowned blue lions and nine red hearts on gold. That is Denmark — not the king's personal arms but the arms of the state, because the State Railways built this with state money and the shield says who owns the house. Twenty metres above it, at the tip of the spire, a gilded crown stands on its own.

There is a third badge on these walls, and it belongs to neither the towns nor the country. Cut in the same pale stone, under its own crown, is a winged wheel — a wheel seen end-on with a wing spread either side of it. That is the railway's own mark, the emblem railways across Europe gave themselves in the nineteenth century: the wheel for the track, the wings for the speed. Here it sits directly above a carved panel of three towers over water, which is Copenhagen. So the stone is stacked in order of arrival — the city first, and the railway that came to it above.

The street doors along the Bernstorffsgade front are all different. A basket of flowers carved over one. An urn wreathed in leaves over the next. A round medallion in scrolling foliage. The house numbers run along the facade — 10, 12, 14, 18 — as though this were a row of separate buildings rather than one enormous one, and each front door was given its own stone.

Above the entrance arches are four carved heads, and they are not saints or allegories. They are the men who built the station.

Heinrich Wenck, the architect. Charles Ambt, director-general of the State Railways. C. F. S. Ernst, the railway engineer. And Einar Ambt, the architect who stood on this site through all eight years of construction — and who was Charles Ambt's son. The relief of Ernst is signed by Jens Lund and dated 1911.

He sits as a keystone at the top of an arch, helmet strapped under the chin, the goggles pushed up onto his forehead as though he has just stopped. In 1911 that was a brand-new kind of person, carved onto a building whose entire purpose was moving people by steam. The stonework is dated by what it chose to find interesting.

And then the ones that are not people at all.

A monkey sits on a corner, high up where the stone band turns, with its hands gripping the ledge on either side of its head as though it has just hauled itself over the wall. Ears out, mouth wide, looking down at the street. It is the one soft thing in a hard junction where the cornice, the guttering and two faces of brick all meet.

One doorway on the Bernstorffsgade front carries royal crowns — one carved into the oak above each door leaf, and one cut into each granite pier beside it. It is the only door like it on the building.

Behind it is a private suite: a great room at the head of the wing, a lobby reached from the street through the tower, two lavatories, a private lift and a stair. Great fireplaces, silk wall hangings, painted ceilings. Carlsen simply calls this end of the building the king's wing.

It was never an architect's flourish. The rooms were written into the bill laid before parliament in November 1902, before the building was designed, and the ministerial plan of October 1904 already draws the room, its cavaliers' room and the corner tower. A royal suite was in the brief.

The door itself is worth a moment. The oak has been refinished recently — warm and honey-coloured, freshly oiled, with a carved Greek-key band across the head and a frieze of leaves beneath the crown. And along the vertical members the old oak is checking, splitting fine and straight along the grain the way seasoned timber does after a century of Danish weather. Restored and still ageing, at the same time.

Round the corner is track 1. The royal wing stands directly against it, with its own service platform on the far side and a door leading straight from that platform into the rooms. The railway still calls it the king's platform. So the number is not an accident of counting: track 1 is track 1 because of who used it. The rooms have never stopped being royal — there is a documented royal journey from here as late as 2018 — and the public has been let in exactly once, on a ticketed tour in March 2015.

The entrance hall is a cube. Carlsen records 330 square metres of floor and a height of 18 metres, which makes the room about as wide and as deep as it is tall. The tower outside is not an ornament stuck on a roof; it is the outside of this room.

The ceiling is a concrete vault ribbed into a star pattern, and it does not sit on anything. It hangs. There is an iron roof frame above it carrying timber rafters, and the whole vault is suspended from that.

In the middle of that hanging ceiling is a circle of gold and dark blue with the Danish points of the compass around it — N, NØ, Ø, SØ — and a long pointer lying across the face.

It is not a compass. It is a wind indicator, and it still works. The pointer is linked to the weather vane on the spire directly overhead, so it shows the wind blowing across the roof at this moment. A traveller in 1911 could come in off the street and read the weather off the ceiling.

Stephenson was an English colliery engineman who could not read until he was eighteen. He built the locomotives for the world's first public steam railway, the Stockton and Darlington, in 1825, and then for the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830 — the line that proved a railway could carry ordinary passengers to a timetable. He also settled the distance between the rails at four foot eight and a half inches, which is still the gauge of most of the world's railways.

Including the rails under this building.

Outside stand the ten districts the railway reached. Just inside the door sit the two men who made it possible. That is a complete argument, in stone, across about forty metres.

There is one more oddity here. Every clock in this station was wired to a central regulator on Danish standard time in 1911 — except the one on the tower. It was deliberately left off the system. The clock the city looked at and the clock the travellers ran for were two different clocks.

One detail tells the whole story. The restaurant had a serving connection into the first-and-second-class waiting room, so coffee and tea were carried in. The third-class room had no such connection. The difference was not only which room you sat in. It was whether anybody came in with a tray.

People at the time could see which room the plan had given least to. The architect who walked readers through the building in print, five days before it opened, picked out the third-class waiting room as the part of the design that would age fastest. That is not hindsight. It is 1911 talking about itself, in the week the doors opened.

The room that undid the plan

And then the building answered the question itself, with the largest thing in it.

At the old station you had to pass through your class's waiting room to reach the train. Here you did not. The great hall was so large, and filled so quickly with shops, kiosks and benches, that a German reviewer in 1913 decided the waiting rooms had become an afterthought. The hall was where people waited now — and the hall was open to everybody.

That is the whole argument in two photographs. The first is the hall as drawn: a finished room with nothing on the floor, standing beside a suite of waiting rooms sorted by distance and then by class. The second is the same floor a few years later, with a kiosk out in the middle of it and people using the room as one room.

The plan had a place for everyone. The hall had room for everyone, and those turned out to be different things.

The circulation, though, was worked out beautifully, and it held. Departing passengers went down six stairs set in a row in the middle of the floor, tickets clipped at the top where barrier rails split each stairhead into three lanes, and reached their platforms through benched tunnels under the hall floor. Arriving passengers came up by separate stairs in the far wall.

Departures dropped through the floor. Arrivals rose through the wall. Two streams of people in one room, designed never to cross.

There are two timber roofs in this station, and they are not the same thing. This is the first: the roof over the great hall, the room you are standing in.

It is wood. Not iron, not glass and steel — timber arches over a hall 138 metres long, 56 metres wide and about 20 metres to the crown. Nearly eight thousand square metres of station, roofed in carpentry.

This is where the row of piers pays off. Because they are standing there, no arch has to reach across 56 metres; each one spans 28. Piers down the middle of a room are normally the price you pay for a bridge. Here they are what bought the roof.

Then the thing almost nobody knows about this roof. It is a copy.

The full technical account of the building, published in December 1912, gives the great roof exactly one sentence: a timber construction like the one in the great hall of the now-closed station. That is Herholdt's station of 1864, the building this one replaced. And the timber contractor was I. W. Unmack, the same house that had built Herholdt's hall forty-seven years earlier.

One firm roofed both of Copenhagen's main stations, half a century apart, and the second roof was deliberately made to resemble the first. Nobody wrote down why.

And the first roof still exists. When Herholdt's station came down its timber arches were not scrapped. In 1918 the Ministry of the Interior paid 22,600 kroner for them, and they were taken to Aarhus and re-erected over the city's new stadium halls. One of those halls still stands, and Herholdt's arches are still holding it up — three hundred kilometres from where they were raised, more than a century and a half after they were cut.

So the roof over your head is a copy, and the original is still working, in another city.

So the hall sorts its own wildlife by structure. A hedgehog is holding up an arch. A squirrel is not, and does not pretend to be.

The leaves between them are not filler either. They are beech and oak, the two trees that stand for Denmark — and they do not stand for the same thing.

Through the 1800s the beech became the national tree of the romantic imagination, the tree of the ordinary people and of popular rule. The national anthem, written in 1819, opens by describing the country as standing with broad beeches, and every Dane knows the line. The oak was the older symbol, and the one attached to the age of absolute monarchy that had just ended.

Both are cut into this wall, in the same kind of flat panel as the squirrel, a few metres apart. The oak is unmistakable — lobed leaves and acorns.

Down the stairs is the second roof, and it is a different building altogether.

Six halls stand over the tracks, each 102 metres long and twelve metres to the crown, built in bays of 19.15 metres. They are timber the whole way through. Only the columns are iron.

This is also the closest you will get to the carpentry anywhere in the station. In the great hall the arches are twenty metres over your head. Here they are twelve, and at that distance the individual boards in each arch are legible, along with the iron shoes they land in.

The system has a name and a patent. These are lattice arches built to a German system called System Stephan, and one firm in the country could supply it: I. W. Unmack held the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian rights. Eighteen separate trades on this station went out to public tender between 1906 and 1911. This one never did, because there was nobody to bid against. The timber roof was not simply the cheap material. It was a patented product with a single supplier in the Nordic countries.

The station Wenck designed had three great glazed platform halls — iron and glass, closed at the ends with glass walls, the full nineteenth-century cathedral treatment. It was in the bill laid before parliament in November 1902. Hamburg was building precisely that at precisely that moment; its main station opened in 1906 under a glass shed 206 metres long.

Copenhagen never built it. On 13 November 1903 the ministry struck the glazed halls out of its own bill. It saved about two million kroner, roughly a third of the building's cost. The line in the papers is brutally short: "The great platform halls are replaced with ordinary platform roofs."

The building has been altered continuously, and it is worth knowing what is 1911 and what is not.

1917 — the Boulevard tunnel opens and the through station finally runs through. 1921 — tracks 9 to 12. The early 1920s — Wenck extends the south wing on Bernstorffsgade himself. 1932–34 — electrification hangs overhead wires from welded steel portals spanning up to ten tracks, straight through the timber roof; the first electric S-trains arrive on 15 May 1934.

1934 is the year the sorted plan was formally let go: third class was abolished and the two halls were opened into each other — the rule catching up with what the great hall had been doing on its own since 1911. In 1935 a cinema was fitted into waiting rooms the S-trains had made redundant — 303 seats, by Wenck's successor K. T. Seest, running until 1971.

1978–94 — a master plan by Dissing + Weitling reversed Wenck's logic: departures and arrivals merged, the tunnels abandoned, the baggage island removed. Most of the sorted plan described here was undone then, not by time and not by fire.

21 March 1986 — welding sparks during renovation set light to paper that fell into a container of impregnating fluid, and the halls over the S-train tracks burned. Those arches were rebuilt, which is why that one roof is not from 1911.

2004–08 — six hundred million kroner, and the building was rebuilt from underneath while 1,400 trains a day ran over the works. In 2007 the four big columns under the hall roof were jacked onto new steel columns so the platforms could be widened beneath them; the timber arches over the tracks were untouched and still stand on their own 1911 iron columns. Between 2005 and 2006 about eight tonnes of copper were replaced with faithful copies made in a workshop set up on the square outside.

15 December 2010 — the hall clocks were swapped. So the clock people mean when they say "meet me under the clock" is not Wenck's. The tower clock is.

Checked 25 August 2026.

The station is open and free. There are no ticket barriers — hall, vestibule and shops are open to anyone, and a ticket is for standing on a platform, not for walking in.

For the building as one object, go to Tietgensbroen, the bridge at the south end, and look north. Six semicircular glazed hall ends line up together from there and from nowhere else.

For the front, stand well back on Banegårdspladsen — and remember what you are standing on.

The ten districts need you underneath them, on the main front, to read the names. The carved faces are on the tops of the granite columns, directly overhead as you come in. The doors reward walking the whole Bernstorffsgade front and looking above each one; the one with crowns is the king's. The wind rose is in the middle of the vestibule ceiling, and the locomotive that drives it is on a spire, so it is worth stepping back across the street once to find one.

Two things are easy to walk past. Stand under a street canopy and look up at it — the boarded underside, the brackets, the lanterns. And follow one downpipe from the top down, to watch it curve out around the stone bands rather than through them.

Come in low sun if you can. Red brick and sandstone have almost no texture at midday, and the shields only read properly when the brick courses around them are throwing a shadow.

The royal rooms are not open, and there are no regular tours of the building.

And there is one more building, twelve minutes away by train. Østerport is Wenck's too — 1897, still standing, still protected, still in daily use. It went up as a temporary station while the railway kept its options open about how it would one day reach this one, and temporary lasted twenty years, until the Boulevard tunnel joined the two halves of Copenhagen's railway in 1917. It is the same hand at a quarter of the size, and it is the next building in this series.

Every building is an experiment, and this one is old enough to have the answer.

The bet here was timber, and it was forced. The glazed halls had been struck out, and what replaced them had to be quick and affordable. What Denmark had, and still has, is carpenters.

A hundred and fifteen years later the timber arches stand over every track but the S-train platforms. The roofing felt above them is still doing its job. The slate ran ninety-four years before it needed replacing. And Herholdt's arches, from the station before this one, are still holding up a hall in Aarhus.

The material everyone was proud of has done less well. The reinforced-concrete decks at the front — among the first large concrete works in Denmark — are the part of this building that has needed attention again and again, most recently through the whole 2004–08 rebuild.

Two things in that are worth taking home to a house.

A timber roof you can see is a timber roof that gets looked after. These arches are not clad, not boxed in, not hidden behind a ceiling. They stand in the open air at both ends of a shed, and because anyone can inspect them from the ground, somebody does. What can be seen, gets maintained.

And a modest material in a good position beats an expensive one in a bad one. That felt roof was the cheap answer. It is still working, because it sits on a roof with a fall, with air beneath it, and with somebody responsible for it.

There is a last turn in this, and it belongs to Wenck. The building he is remembered for is the one his own biographer called a crippled version of what he drew. But the part that was cut — the great glass shed — is exactly the part that would have dated fastest. What the ministry left him instead was carpentry, and carpentry has outlasted the concrete, outlasted the style, and outlasted the argument about whether he was any good.

Worth looking up on the way out.

Open questions

• The beech and the oak.
• The monkey, the lions and the beast with the snake.
• The twelve town arms.
• The painted shields in the leaded glass of the great hall: which arms they are, and whether they repeat the twelve outside or add to them.
• The metal plate dated 2008 on one of the new platform piers. It is shaped like a cover, with a slot beneath it and a line of lettering above the date that our photographs cannot resolve. Whether it closes a deposit left at the end of the 2004–08 works is not established.
• The phrase noget dansk.
• The 1892 drawing annotated Arkitekt Arboe's Projekt.