Trade In Hamburg's Warehouse District

Welcome to our virtual city walk on the subject of trade in Hamburg’s warehouse district. Right now, it is more a boat trip than a walk, because we are on one of the six canals passing through the warehouse district. The German name for this canal is Kehrwiederfleet and we are now travelling due east.

We are now entering a canal named Brooksfleet and here we can see some of the hatches in the storehouses. If you look up, you will see a total of seven floors – a fairly typical number of storeys in the buildings of the warehouse district.

Now, imagine it is the year 1920 and we are on one of those barges I mentioned. The unloading would begin now. The boat is full of sacks, crates, barrels or bales to be transferred to one of these levels. At the top of the buildings you can see green oriel-like structures. In the past, rope winches were placed underneath, pulling up the goods from the boats up to the hatches.

Now we are on one of the floors in Block E of the warehouse district – the storehouses here are marked with letters. Such a floor can carry about 4,000 pounds per square metre. And that’s a good thing, because if the business was really thriving here, the floors would have been stacked up to the ceiling. Typically with coffee, tea, cocoa, spices, carpets or hides.

Inside the warehouses, real professionals took care of the goods: These were the “Quartiersleute” in German, a good translation of this would be “warehousemen” in English. These warehousemen always worked in four-person companies, and this is where the German name “Quartiersleute”, literally “quartermen”, comes from. These guys knew a lot – if not everything – about how to store, weigh, sort, clean, dry or ventilate, depending on the kind of care the different goods stored in here required.

Even though you can see a waterway down below while looking through this hatch, we are actually looking out of the side of the warehouse that faces the street. That means that goods lowered from here on this hook could then be loaded onto coaches or trucks. The basic principle of these storehouses has always been to have one side facing the water and the other side facing the street. The stream you can see down there is the Zollkanal, or “customs channel”, separating the warehouse district from the city of Hamburg.

We have now landed on the opposite side of the place where, a little earlier, we just arrived by boat, or should I say, by barge! And here we are now standing in the middle of a street. The address here is Brook No. 5. You see, there are not only letters for the warehouse blocks, but also proper house numbers.

The exciting thing about this address is that it is where the company Weber & Möller is located. This is the last quartermen’s company in business in this area – and it continues to be run primarily out of a sense of tradition.

Speaking of tradition, we have now walked from Brook street eastwards onto Pickhuben street. And this is Hällssen & Lyon, the first and, naturally, the oldest tenant in the warehouse district. This is a tea trading company which, back in the day, used to have their tea sacks delivered by barge to the storehouses. Nowadays, that tea is transported by truck to a large warehouse in the south-east of Hamburg.

What remains here are new types of use: A coffee roasting house, a café and even a coffee museum can now all be found here.

The warehouse district is run by the city-owned company Hamburger Hafen Logistik AG, or Hamburg free harbour storage building corporation – that’s a long one, I know. This organisation always keeps a very close eye on renovations and redesigns concerning the regulations regarding monument preservation – as since 1991, the entire area has been listed as a historical monument.

We have returned to Brook street and are now standing in front of the world’s largest Oriental rug storage. Carpets are not perishable goods, but they are as susceptible to temperature fluctuations. And, as mentioned before, the thick walls here ensure relatively constant temperatures throughout the year.

In contrast to the earlier coffee or tea storage buildings, this is an area where the warehouse district still exists in the form of its original purpose. Nevertheless, it has to be mentioned that of the 200 carpet traders which originally did business here, only around about 50 are left, so this type of use is also in decline.

We’re almost at the end of our tour. So let’s look for an exit here. Nowadays, this is easy – you simply cross this bridge, Kornhausbrücke, and you are in the city centre.