Copenhagen Central Station

The man who saw the answer was an engineer named Holger Hammerich. In 1885 he put forward a plan for rearranging Copenhagen's railways, and it got attention. Put the missing link underground, he argued, beneath the boulevards being laid out on the demolished ramparts. Hence the name it still has: the Boulevard Line.

Hammerich went into the Copenhagen city council in 1887 and the Folketing at the end of that decade, and kept the seat for the rest of his life. So when the Rigsdag passed the construction act in March 1904 — the act that ordered both the Boulevard Line and this station — the man whose idea it was was sitting in the chamber. He had waited nineteen years.

He never rode it. Hammerich died on 4 October 1915, two years before the first trains ran through. In 1917 the city named a street after him. Walk north out of the station across Vesterbrogade and Bernstorffsgade becomes Hammerichsgade, running along the east side of the railway cut he argued for.

Why the new station had to be built first

The tunnel's line ran straight through Herholdt's station.

So the act set the order of work: build the new station, move all the traffic onto it, then dig. That is the whole explanation of this building. It is not a station that was replaced because it wore out. It is a station built so that something else could happen.

They built it close to where the first station had stood, in Dronningens Enghave. Sixty-four years on, the railway came back to where it started.

The scale of the swap is the plainest measure of why. Herholdt's station had four tracks under one roof. Wenck's has twelve through platform tracks and six passenger platforms.

North of Vesterbrogade nothing could be touched until the traffic had moved, and that excavation did not start until September 1913. The last of the ramparts came down between 1912 and April 1914.

One thing was moved rather than dug through. Frihedsstøtten, the monument of the 1790s to the ending of adscription, stood in the way. It was taken down in 1909–10 and re-erected 5.3 metres east, in a copy cut by the sculptor Jens Lund in 1911. Lund is the man who carved the sandstone figures on this station's own facade in 1910. Two commissions, one sculptor, one building site.

The eastern pair of tracks opened on 1 December 1917, six years to the day after the station went into traffic. Nørreport followed on 1 July 1918, with two round neo-baroque pavilions on Frederiksborggade drawn by Wenck; Copenhagen called them the soup tureens, and pulled them down in 1932. The last two tracks opened on 1 October 1921, seventeen years after the vote.

Aarhus was laying out a sports park and needed to span two halls. On 29 July 1918 the Interior Ministry granted 22,600 kroner "for the purchase of timber arches from Copenhagen's old railway station" — the grant wording, translated from the Danish. The state shipped Herholdt and Unmack's arches to Jutland.

Axel Høeg-Hansen designed the stadium building around them, classical in outline and painted in the national colours, red and white. Two arched halls joined by an open colonnade, lit by skylights and electric light. Only the western hall got a wooden floor, so that was the one used for lectures and concerts as well as sport. It opened on 22 February 1920, and the park was inaugurated on 5 June 1920.

A date to flag. Danish railway sources put the re-erection at 1916–18. Aarhus city archive records the purchase on 29 July 1918, the stadium building not quite finished in September 1919, and the western hall in use from February 1920. This study follows the archive that paid the bill.

Then half of it burned. Under the occupation the Germans took both halls for storage. On 27 March 1943 four Aarhus boys aged sixteen to nineteen set fire to mattresses inside the eastern hall. It was the first sabotage action in Aarhus, and the hall burned to the ground. Hans Petersen, Willi Clausen, Svend Rye Jensen and Harry Ib Brønnum Jensen were sentenced that May to terms from eighteen months to eight years and four months. A replacement hall was not finished until 1954.

The western hall is still standing, and you can walk into it. It is at Stadion Allé 70 in Aarhus, part of Ceres Park & Arena, in service as one of two ordinary sports halls — known locally as nothing grander than hal 1 and hal 2. The Danish Association of Architects describes it flatly as the one surviving original hall, with "arches from Copenhagen's old railway station". Louis Armstrong played two concerts under those arches in 1955 to more than 7,000 people.

It is being looked after as this is written. Zaha Hadid Architects' new Aarhus stadium is going up alongside, the ground turned out to be soft, and the contractors had to sink a secant pile wall to stop the 1920 halls moving. The work put the stadium about five months behind.

The oldest thing on that site is a Copenhagen railway roof from 1864. It is also the thing they stopped to protect.

It was not only stations. The same office drew gatekeepers' houses, a command post, an engine shed, railwaymen's houses, goods sheds and toilet buildings — and, following German practice, signs, door handles, frescoes and chandeliers. He also drew the State Railways' central workshops at Otto Busses Vej, on a site of 160,000 square metres. Slots- og Kulturstyrelsen counts more than 300 buildings behind him and calls him Denmark's most productive railway architect.

What ties them together is not a style. It is the paint. Swedish red and bottle green: he introduced the pair on the Coast Line and they became his signature. They are on Copenhagen Central Station too. If you have taken a train in Denmark you have stood in a building Wenck drew, and you can often tell by the colour of the woodwork.

Thirteen years of being told no

His schemes for this site run 1892, 1896, 1904, and then a whole series in 1905. Read the drawings in order.

1892. One long elevation, signed H. Wenck, marked PLAN II, with a scale bar running to 100 Danish ells and the crowned stamp of the Chief Engineer for the State Railway Works. Two great arched sheds turn glazed gables to the street. Wenck's own first idea for Copenhagen turned the glass toward the city.

1896. A photographic print pasted on a mount, lettered "Project for Copenhagen Central Station" and signed H.W. 1896. Now the station turns a wall to the city. The great arch over the square holds a rose window set in masonry, not a glazed gable. In four years the glass had turned away from the street.

1904. A ground plan inscribed "Plan B. Laid before the meeting of 26 October 1904". Two hands have signed it, one of them Wenck's. The order is the reverse of what was built: departure hall nearest the platforms, arrival hall furthest away. Beyond them a hall for cabs. The royal waiting room sits in a round tower on the street corner.

Thomas Arboe, 1836–1917, is the other name in this story. He trained at the Academy from 1855 to 1862, served as an army officer up to captain, and from 1868 was an architect to the Jutland–Funen railways, from 1880 in Aarhus for the State Railways. Aarhus's second main station, 1883–84, is his, with W.A. Thulstrup — and afterwards the two of them disagreed about who had drawn what. Thulstrup said Arboe did only the front. Arboe claimed the whole building.

A print in Danmarks Jernbanemuseum's catalogue carries a line in pen below the image: Arkitekt Arboe's Projekt 1892. It shows two great arched sheds with glazed gables to the street, a centre block with two spired towers, a winged figure above the parapet, and a clock dial to each side of the great arch.

That is the same building as Wenck's signed sheet of 1892.

The two were compared crop for crop at matched scale while this study's drawings were catalogued. They agree in every part: the star ornament at the apex of each arch, the finials, the number and rhythm of the openings along the parapet, the position of the standing figure on the corner, even the band of lettering across the front, letter position for letter position.

One difference. The pen date on the Arboe print reads plainly. The year under Wenck's signature does not; 1892 there is the catalogue's reading, not the sheet's.

So one of two things is true. Either two men's names sit on one design, or one of the attributions is wrong.

Why Arboe's scheme lost is recorded nowhere we can find. On this evidence it is not even certain there was a contest to lose. The study prints what the sheets show and leaves the question open.

The sentence everyone quotes

The speeches on 30 November 1911 were made by Crown Prince Christian and the traffic minister, Thomas C. Larsen. The Crown Prince said the station would surely stand as a monumental memorial of Danish building art at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The line always quoted from Wenck is this. The building should be "fitting for Denmark, for our country's circumstances and its character" — so that the last impression a departing Dane took away was the same one that met an arriving foreigner: something Danish.

Read that twice. It is a whole architectural argument in one sentence. Not beautiful, not modern, not impressive: of this place, and working as both a farewell and a greeting.

One honest note about it. The wording is everywhere in Danish, and every trail leads to the same place: a Danish National Archives web feature made for the station's centenary in 2011, which is no longer online. No printing of it from 1911 has been found. Illustreret Tidende covered the new station — Johannes V. Jensen in January 1911, Carl Schiøtz on 26 November, four days before it opened — but none of that is by Wenck. The sentence may well be his. This study cannot yet show where it was first printed, or that he said it at the opening.

That cutting averaged nine metres deep over 3.2 kilometres, 1,525 of them in covered tunnel, and was dug wide enough for four standard-gauge tracks. At Nørreport it opened out to thirty metres. The sides were shored as the work went, which the owners of the houses along the boulevards valued — "so their houses did not slide and their foundation walls did not crack", as the account puts it. At least three steam excavators worked the line. About seven hundred men were on it. One contract alone moved 300,000 cubic metres of earth in eighty tip wagons, out past Østerbro Station to Svanemøllebugten, where it filled about fifteen hectares of sea. A second contract moved 155,000 cubic metres, tipped at Kalvebod Strand.

A city got a tunnel and a shoreline out of the same work.

It is a bridge

The tracks are sunk below street level and the building sits over them. That is the thing to understand about this station.

The Danish national encyclopaedia puts it in one line: the great two-aisled main hall, 138 metres long and 20 metres high, "lies like a bridge across all the tracks".

So the parts most people think of as "the station" — the ticket hall, the concourse, the shops — are on a bridge. When you walk in off Bernstorffsgade you do not go down to the trains because the trains are underground. You go down because you were already up. The listing calls the hall a large, open, central room "with six stairways down to the platforms" — one each.

Under the brick, the bridge is modern. The foundation, the basement and the deck that carries Banegårdspladsen are all reinforced concrete. The building everybody calls a timber station stands on reinforced concrete.

How tight is the clearance? Tight enough to matter seventy years later. When overhead wires went up for electrification in 1984 there was not enough room. Under the station hall the tracks were lowered 20 to 30 centimetres. Under Tietgensbroen that was not the answer. One night in May 1984 the bridge — 3,600 tonnes of it — was jacked up 255 millimetres at the Bernstorffsgade abutment and 96 millimetres at the far end.

The mistake under the platforms

Somebody forgot the tunnel.

The decision to build a pedestrian subway, so passengers could change platforms without going up into the hall, was taken late. The platforms were already laid. "So the platforms had to be broken completely up again and a tunnel built" — the account's own words.

Further out along the platforms there is a second tunnel. It ran to the Central Post Building and belonged to the postal service.

The shape

Six platform halls cover the tracks. They run out from the main hall and end toward Tietgensbroen in semicircular glazed gables — the same half-round that closed Herholdt's hall, repeated six times.

The technique has a name. Victor von Röll's Enzyklopädie des Eisenbahnwesens, the standard German railway encyclopaedia of the day, sets out the family in its article on station halls: for wide spans the builders used Bohlen oder Kreuzholzbogen, board or crossed-timber arches, in two versions — de l'Orme, with the boards standing on edge, and Emy, with the boards laid flat. One is a sixteenth-century invention, the other a nineteenth-century one, and both exist to make a big arch out of small wood.

Röll then names the old Copenhagen hall: Auch die frühere H. des Bahnhofs Kopenhagen hatte eine ganz ähnliche Konstruktion — the earlier hall of Copenhagen station had a quite similar construction, meaning the Emy board arch he has just illustrated from Munich, 1848.

So Herholdt's 1864 roof was a board arch of a known European type. And Wenck's is not the same thing. Röll's entry for the new station calls it eine Holzfachwerkkonstruktion von gefälligem Aussehen — a timber lattice-truss construction of pleasing appearance — carried on iron uprights, six halls of 25 metres span each.

That is the real relationship between the two roofs, and it is better than "inspired by". The old hall was an arch of boards. The new one is a lattice: an open web of small boards, curved, with the load running through the triangles. The material is the grandfather's. The engineering is not.

Röll does not agree with the Danish record on three points, and this study will not pretend he does. He gives the span as 25 metres where the Danish sources give about 19. He calls the supports iron lattice stanchions where the Danish listing calls them cast-iron columns. And he credits the work to a firm he names Stephansdach, where Ingeniøren names I. W. Unmack. All three stay open.

What the cast-iron columns do

They hold the arches up, and they are meant to be seen.

The national listing describes the platform halls as roofed with "a visible, partly red-painted timber arch construction of six arch-spans, carried on visible cast-iron columns". The same document names the protected fabric as the arched timber construction with cast-iron columns over the platforms and in the main hall. Both roofs land on iron.

Nothing is boxed in. The column is a column, the arch is an arch, the paint tells you which is which. Above them the coverings differ: the platform halls carry roofing felt, the main roofs are hung with slate.

The boards were given two coats of a flame-retardant liquid. That was a precaution, not a rule; no fire regulation demanded it.

Six halls, one profile

Ingeniøren was describing the arches going up on 20 May 1911. The station opened on 30 November 1911.

Six identical halls. One arch profile. 102 metres of it repeated six times over. Every piece small enough to be carried and fixed by hand. That is what the State Railways said they were buying: not only the 150,000 kroner, but half the time.

This study could not find an account of the raising itself — no source consulted describes the scaffolding, the order of the bays, or how many men were on it.

The halls that were nearly not built

They almost did not happen at all.

Wenck wanted one great roof over all the platforms. The Rigsdag struck it out as too expensive during construction. For a while, as one account puts it, "it looked as though there would be no platform roofs at all". Then, in the middle of the build, the money was granted after all.

By then the main building was finished. The new roofs could not be brought up against it properly, and Wenck "had to make a patch job", with small roofs bridging between the platform halls and the station building.

You can go and look at the patch. The listing records it without comment: between the platform halls and the south wing there is a half-roof of red-painted timber hung with slate.

One caution on that account. The funding story comes from a source that carries no references for it. The patch it describes is in the listing, so the outcome is documented; the politics behind it is not.

It probably also explains a drawing. The Franz Sedivy bird's-eye view of 1908 — three years before the station opened — shows the station with low platform canopies and no great halls. The study cannot prove Sedivy was drawing an approved scheme rather than guessing, but a station without platform halls is the scheme the budget story describes.

The part nobody explained

The great hall is timber too, and here the record simply stops.

Ingeniøren's full technical account of the finished station, in December 1912, says only this: the roofing of the main hall is executed as a timber construction like the one used in the great hall of the now-closed station.

A resemblance. No reason. No cost, no span, no fire argument, no policy. That single sentence is the entire basis of the "inspired by Herholdt" line that every modern source repeats — and searching the Danish engineering press across 1905 to 1920 turns up nothing further.

So the honest answer is two answers. The platform halls were timber because it was cheaper and quicker. The main hall was timber like the old one, and nobody wrote down why.

A German reviewer noticed. Writing in the Prussian ministry's journal in 1913, de Bruyn observed that timber had been driven from its dominant position by iron, and that it was to be welcomed that here someone had the daring to bring the long-proven material back into honour. That is a reader's admiration a year after the fact, not a reason given by the men who chose.

Trap Danmark adds the other observation worth keeping. The main hall's great open room with its timber arches is "a good example of how engineers came to shape architecture from the middle of the nineteenth century with visible constructions". The roof is the decoration.

The four men over the door

A building that names its own contractor in the trade press and then puts the client, the engineer, the architect and the site architect in stone over its front door has a fairly clear view of who did the work.

One thing to retire. The explanation repeated across the Danish web is that timber was probably a stylistic preference because Wenck rarely used cast iron. It is unsourced, and it is false on the building's own fabric: the timber arches of the platform halls — and of the main hall — stand on visible cast-iron columns.

Wenck's biographical entry names a habit: "the preferred use of genuine Danish materials". On this building that comes to brick, stone, slate, timber, iron and copper.

The brick

Red brick, laid bare — no render, no paint, the brick itself the finished surface. It stands on a plinth of granite.

The wall is not plain. Five horizontal bands of natural stone run across the facades, which finish in a main cornice. There are blind panels, niches, sill bands of sandstone, and arches turned in brick over the openings, cut from the same material as the wall they interrupt. The original windows are largely still there, in many types, mostly white-painted and divided by glazing bars. White against red, repeated over that many openings, breaks the mass up.

Where the brick came from, nobody appears to have written down. The listing record describes the wall, Trap Danmark describes it, the municipal survey describes it, and not one of them names a brickworks. That is an odd gap in a building whose listing record names its floor tiles.

The stone

Granite for the plinth, and for the six columns of the half-open arcade at the main entrance. Over that arcade sits a lean-to roof carried on carved timber corbels — wood doing a job usually given to stone. Sandstone for the bands, the sill courses, and everything with a figure cut into it.

The copper

Copper for the spires, and for the rainwater that comes off them.

Jens Lund, who cut the figures

Ten sandstone figures stand on the main facade. They are folk types in regional dress. They were cut in 1910, the year before the station opened, by Jens Lund.

Lund was born in Videbæk in 1873 and died in Copenhagen in 1946. He came to sculpture late. He trained first as a house painter, worked as a dairyman, and began learning woodcarving at twenty-one. He followed the Academy from 1896 to 1901, and studied under Vilhelm Bissen and Anders Bundgaard. His biographer credits him with a craftsman's soundness and conscience toward the material, and finds something hesitant and cautious in the man.

The ten figures are not all he cut here. The six granite columns of the arcade carry four faces each. Twenty-four faces, no two of them alike — the difference is the point, because they were meant to stand for the range of people in the country.

Six years later he cut twelve craftsmen in sandstone for the front of the Technological Institute, 1916–17. And from 1914 he held a second post: sculpture conservator at Statens Museum for Kunst. He took the Eckersberg Medal twice, in 1919 and 1920, and was made a knight of Dannebrog in 1934.

Four faces that are not folk types

Above the arches of the main entrance are four portrait heads in sandstone. Over the arch furthest to the right is Heinrich Wenck. Over the others are Charles Ambt, director-general of the State Railways; C.F.S. Ernst, the railway engineer; and Einar Ambt, 1877–1928, the supervising architect. Einar Ambt was at Wenck's office from 1904 to 1912, which is to say the whole build. He was also Charles Ambt's son.

The architect put his own face on the front of the building.

Someone else did the same thing later, without being asked. Hidden between the doors out to Banegårdspladsen there is a small face in fired clay. A bricklayer made it in the 1960s. He had spent years looking after the building, and he left himself in it on the way out.

Look up almost anywhere and there is an animal. A hare on a pier in the hall. A fish at the springing of an arch. A crayfish cut into a sandstone band. Monkeys and lions on corbels, birds in the stonework, and several things that are not any animal you could name.

DSB printed the reason in 2008. Per Axel Buur, one of its chief inspectors, gave two ideas of Wenck's. The first is that these are fabeldyr — fable animals, invented ones — and fable animals are always travelling. That, he said, suited a railway station.

The second is about weight. Wenck held that anything heavy and load-bearing should look as though it were being carried by kraftkarle — strong fellows — and that a strong fellow could be an animal as easily as a man. So the creatures are put where the load is: under a cornice, beside the springing of an arch, at the head of a pier.

That explains the placing better than any reading of the individual animals. The crayfish beside the arch is not there because a crayfish means something. It is there because something has to be seen holding the arch up.

The building says the same thing. Four of the creatures — the porcupine, the hare, the fish and the clawed crustacean — sit in the identical position: a rectangular sandstone block at the springing of an arch in the hall arcade, directly above the pier's cap, each cut to the same depth in the same panel. One slot, repeated, filled with a different animal each time. The pier under the porcupine carries 1908 incised in the stone, so they went up with the building and are not a later addition.

That is also what kills the readings that suggest themselves. A hare for speed, fitting for a railway, until you notice the porcupine in the same slot. Danish native fauna, until you notice the porcupine is not a Danish animal. The zodiac, which takes the crab and the fish and leaves the other two stranded. Each is a good guess and the wall refutes it.

Two cautions, and they matter. The explanation comes from a DSB article of 2008 quoting a member of its staff, not from anything Wenck wrote in 1911 — second hand, and ninety-seven years late.

And it stops where it stops. It says why creatures are there and where they go. It does not say what any one of them is meant to be, and nothing else does either: the listing record itemises this building's ornament down to its brass fittings and its wrought-iron signs without naming a single animal, and the one magazine article devoted to the station's hidden carvings misses all of them. The carver is unrecorded too. What the porcupine is doing there, beyond holding up an arch, nobody wrote down.

What 115 years did to it

The foundations, the basement and the deck carrying the station forecourt were built in reinforced concrete. A major renovation of the platforms, the roofs, the load-bearing columns and the decks was carried out between 2004 and 2008.

The slate went on in the same years: 4,500 square metres of CUPA 12, rectangles of 60 by 30 centimetres, five to six millimetres thick, quarried at La Campa in Spain. The listing protects black slate roofs. It does not name a quarry.

The timber came closest to going in the fire of March 1986.

The brick has needed nothing on that scale. At 115 years a bare brick wall still looks like a bare brick wall.

What was quietly lost was the small stuff. Wenck drew twelve chandeliers for the hall. Two of them are still in it, and two more are at Østerport.

What the listing actually says

The listing record sets out the values the protection carries, in two lists. They read like a specification.

Outside: the complex as a whole in red bare brick, on plinths of natural stone, under black slate roofs with roof lights and chimney stacks; the older and traditionally made windows and filling doors; the roofs over the platform halls and the lean-to roofs between them and the main buildings; the facade details — towers, projections, spires, cornices, bands, blind panels, niches, balusters, sill bands and brick arches; and the traditional handling of materials.

Inside: first the surviving parts of the plans — the main hall, the vestibule, the platform halls, the stairwells, the offices, the rooms in the main building and the side wings, the royal waiting rooms with their bathrooms. Then, in the record's own phrase, "the timber arch construction with cast-iron columns", over the platforms and in the main hall; the vaults; the benches; the wind rose; the stairs with their handrails and balustrades; the lamps and chandeliers; the signs in wrought iron; the glass paintings; the carved woodwork; the panelling; the plasterwork; the filling doors with their hinges, handles and architraves; and the detailing of the masonry.

Two things follow.

The first is that the listing names cast iron as a heritage value of this building. Not as a regrettable necessity — as protected fabric. The claim that Wenck avoided iron does not survive his own listing record.

The second is that the listing protects a plan and a set of fittings, not a look. Benches and signs are on it. The same record calls the complex a single work of art in which every detail was drawn by Wenck, "from the details on the facade right down to signs, chandeliers, kiosks, benches and floor tiles". If one man drew the benches, the benches are part of the building.

The record is warmest about the wood. "The elegantly worked timber constructions" are, it says, also an expression of high quality in the craft. That is the heritage authority praising a decision taken, over the platforms, to save 150,000 kroner.

One protected thing is worth going to find. Look up as you come in the main entrance: there is a wind rose in the middle of the ceiling. It looks like a compass and it is not one. It is connected to the weather vane on the roof, so it points wherever the wind is blowing.

And one thing is not on the list, because it is younger than the listing. On a granite column on the platform between tracks 5 and 6 there is a plate dated 2008, and with it a capsule holding a newspaper from the renovation, a set of coins, and a roll naming every craftsman who worked on the job. The listing remembered to protect the benches. The craftsmen remembered to write down who they were.

A hundred and fifteen years is a long time to keep one room open.

The room the public did not see. The station has a royal waiting room, built with the rest in 1911, in the southern administration wing on Bernstorffsgade. It has its own platform on the outer face of track 1, the side nearest Tivoli. It is on two floors, and its lift has barely been touched since it was installed. The public had never been inside. In 2015, a hundred and four years on, it was opened for the Copenhagen Architecture Festival.

Before the museum had a museum. The first large exhibition of what is now Danmarks Jernbanemuseum was held in a disused express-goods shed at this station, on Bernstorffsgade — models, photographs, track material, telegraph and signal apparatus. The collection moved on to Sølvgade barracks in 1928 and to Odense in 1975.

The shoe shiner. In 1940 state radio put a microphone in front of a man named Jensen who polished shoes in the station, and Ole Palsbo interviewed him about the work. Jensen was close to his fortieth year in the trade, so he had started around 1900, before this building existed. Somebody thought that was worth broadcasting to the country.

Open sandwiches for the Norwegian children. In July 1945, ten weeks after the liberation, special trains brought Norwegian children through Sweden to Denmark to be fed up after the war. They came through this station. Waiting for them at Hovedbanegården were open sandwiches, packed lunches and milk. The scheme had been planned for two thousand children and ended up moving about seven and a half thousand.

We meet under the clock. In 1958 Claus Hermansen made a documentary for DR about life in the station and called it simply “We meet under the clock”. It went out on 2 May. The clock everybody meant was not Wenck's. On 15 December 2010 Banedanmark took down the three big black-and-white clocks in the hall and put up smaller grey ones; the old ones were up to forty years old and about 1.2 metres across. They were sold on lauritz.com the following month. Denmark's best-known meeting place turned out to be a fitting no older than 1970, and it went to auction.

The coin-operated railway. Since 1967 there has been a model railway in the station. The first was three metres by six, a U on three sides, built by two theatre painters, Melchior Hansen and Juel Berg: a Danish town with a harbour at one end, a station and open country in the middle, mountains at the other. Four trains ran on their own loops. You put in a coin and the trains ran, and the coins went to charity. The coin boxes were forced and the glass broken again and again. In 1994 Danmarks Jernbanemuseum had a second layout built by the Kolding model railway club; the first went to Odense, was restored, and has been on show there since 1999.

The night the roof burned. On 21 March 1986 fire took hold in the platform halls and in the electrical installation over the S-train tracks. Three or four of the heavy timber arches came down onto platform and rails. The damage was put at about 25 million kroner. The burnt arch bays were rebuilt quickly. Timber burns: that is the one real objection to it, the objection de Bruyn named in 1913 and gave little weight to, and in 1986 the station met it.

Who the hall belongs to at night. In 1987 DR let a young woman, Christine Skolmen, make a documentary about the young people who hung around Hovedbanegården. She worked in the nut bar, and she had met them because they stole nuts from her. A station is a warm public room that stays open, and that has been part of what this one is for as long as there has been one. The warming house of 1911–12 and the film of 1987 are the same fact seventy-five years apart.

A hundred years, four days. DSB kept the centenary from 1 to 4 December 2011 — station inspectors giving guided tours, staff in the dress of a hundred years before, a fashion show of DSB uniforms old and new, the railway orchestra, a gospel choir. About 90,000 people used the station on an ordinary weekday then. In 2024 it counted 29,207,935 passengers.

Copenhagen went on general strike at the end of June 1944. On Monday 26 June there was heavy shooting from the station itself, from Enghave Plads, and from roofs around them. On Friday 30 June at eight in the morning a company of German soldiers was drawn up outside the Hotel Astoria, at the station's own door, ready to take the building if it came to that. At ten o'clock all train traffic, S-trains included, was stopped. At the liberation there was fighting again on the Reventlowsgade side of the station and down Istedgade, on 4 and 5 May 1945.

Shot from, shut down, and very nearly seized, inside eleven months.

What we cannot tell you is what had to be repaired afterwards. The listing record does not mention the occupation. Neither do the standard railway histories.

Four black buildings, and then two

The 1978–94 rebuild cleared the hall out: baggage island down, the last of the original wooden kiosks gone.

Then, in 1994, about forty shops were gathered into four new black buildings set inside the hall and given a single name. PLH Arkitekter drew them. DSB owns them; DEAS runs them. (The shopping centre's own account dates its opening to 1992 and counts about twenty-five shops, so take the numbers loosely — the buildings are the fixed point.)

Those four pavilions are what is being halved now.

2026: who, what, and the row

The client is DSB. The lead consultant is Artelia, with AFRY Architects Denmark and Drachmann Arkitekter; the design concept came out of a team including Gottlieb Paludan Architects, the practice that did the 2004–08 renovation. The main contractor is Aarsleff Rail. The outdoor site was set up from 23 March 2026 and the indoor site from 10 April. The build runs about thirty months, to September 2028.

What actually changes, in the hall itself:

• Four retail pavilions become two. The two nearest the platform stairs come out.
• That end of the hall becomes the travel hall — lifts, information, waiting, and room to stand.
• Around 6,000 m² of the hall is in scope, including roughly 2,100 m² of the brick floor, which is being replaced.
• Lifts are moved and renewed. Lighting and signage are redone. Shopfronts get one common face instead of many.
• The two new pavilions are wood, after the original stained-pine kiosks, set on the hall's 6.4-metre module and kept low against the granite columns.

DSB's stated aim is to bring the station's historic architecture closer to its original expression.

And there was friction around the works — from DSB's side about the shops and about the heritage authority, from commentators about the state of the hall. The statements this study gathered on that row cannot yet be traced to a publication, so none of them is quoted here. They are listed as open at the end.

Notice what nobody is arguing. Nobody proposes a hall without shops. The question is which half of the room they get.

Wenck built a hall 138 metres long, in two aisles, with arrival and departure kept apart. In 1934 the two were cut through into one room. In 1994 four black buildings were put back inside it. In 2026 two of those come out again. The argument has run for ninety years, and it has always been the same argument: how much of one room this is allowed to be.

Listed in 1983. The register is the Danish national listing register (Fredede og Bevaringsværdige Bygninger), maintained by Slots- og Kulturstyrelsen; the case number is 3100426.

The listing covers the vestibule, the main hall, the six platform halls, the two wings facing Bernstorffsgade (1904–11, Wenck) and the 1922–25 extension of the south wing. It does not cover the newer extension at the Tietgensgade corner.

In Danish practice fredet is the stronger of the two protections. It reaches inside as well as outside — which is why the vestibule, the main hall and the platform halls are each named — and changes to the protected parts need permission from the state, not only the municipality. That is the frame the 2026 works sit inside.

Yes — freely, at any hour. It is a working railway station and you do not need a ticket to stand in the main hall.

Checked 18 August 2026.

Look up, in the middle. The timber arches are the reason to come. From the centre you can see the whole 138 metres.

Then go down to a platform and look back at the underside of the concourse. You are standing under the bridge you were just standing on. And look at the ends of the platform halls: the half-round glazed gables are the shape Herholdt's hall used once, here six times over.

Then look at the facade. The sandstone figures are high up and easy to walk past for a lifetime.

One warning: the hall is being rebuilt through to 2028, and parts will be hoarded off. That is not a reason to stay away — a building under repair shows you things a finished one hides.

The cheap choice can be the one that lasts. Timber was picked here because it saved 150,000 kroner and half the build time. A hundred and fifteen years later it is the thing people admire. Economy and quality are not opposites, and the cheapest option is not automatically the worst one — it depends entirely on what you are being cheap with.

Bare brick is a finish, and it ages better than a coating. These walls are bare brick — no render, no paint. At 115 years they look like brick. If you own a brick house and are offered render or cladding over its face, that is the real choice: a surface that ages, or a surface that must be maintained to keep looking new.

Sink what you do not want to look at. The railway is below street level so the city can walk over it. On a house the same instinct applies to parking, bins and plant. The question is not where they fit but what you are willing to see.

A room is worth defending. The 2026 works exist because a great hall gradually filled with retail. Domestically this is what happens when every wall gains a cupboard. Decide which room in your house is the room, and protect it from the useful things that want to eat it.

Use an old material in a modern way. That is Ingeniøren's phrase, not ours, and it is the best description of good building.

Aerial photographs: Skråfoto, Klimadatastyrelsen — open public data, used with attribution and processed by us for light and materials. Archive photographs: Københavns Museum and Aarhus Stadsarkiv; the two photographs by Georg Nikolaj Knub have been in the public domain since 1 January 2025. Per-frame holder and licence are not recorded. 62 frames are flagged as records by classification, not by a named archive entry. Eleven frames are of third-party origin and their rights are open. Our own photographs were taken in August 2026.

Reference works consulted and checked against the above: Trap Danmark, danskejernbaner.dk, hovedstadshistorie.dk, danmarksarkiv.dk, the FBB listing record 3100426, Københavns Kommuneplan 2024, DSB.

What we do not publish

This station's own building file is not publicly served, and we have not tried to get around that.

Every drawing reproduced here comes from a public archive — Rigsarkivet and Danmarks Jernbanemuseum — which make these sheets available to anyone who asks. Where an archive does not publish a drawing of a working transport building, we treat that as the archive's decision and leave it there.

The reason is not stated anywhere we could find, and we are not going to guess at it in print. A station is a piece of national infrastructure with a hundred thousand people in it every day, and there are obvious reasons an archive might be careful about what it puts online. That is enough for us to be careful too.

So: this archive publishes what public archives publish. No Heritage Study depends on material obtained any other way, and none ever will. If that means a study has fewer drawings than we would like, it has fewer drawings.

Still open

• Why the main hall is timber. Not answered by the Danish engineering press 1905–1920. The study says so rather than repeating the "inspired by Herholdt" line as if it were a reason.
• Whether the 1908 bird's-eye shows an approved scheme. If it does, the platform halls were added after 1908.
• Who signed the 1865 Herholdt sheet. Not Herholdt. Unresolved, so no name is printed.
• The 2026 statements. Three quotations that reached the study in 2026 have no publication, date or link behind them. They stay out of the text until a source is found.