A Figure of 8 Slow Circuit : London-Cologne-Copenhagen-Hamburg-Amsterdam-London by train

With a need to travel to Scandinavia last week to join our Danish studio and visit our new studio in Copenhagen - train travel was the only logical low carbon option. A return flight from London to Copenhagen would result in over 300KG of Carbon jettisoned across the 1900km (or so) of air space. By train it’s less than 14KG of Carbon across over 2,300km slow land travel. It’s a fascinating but frightening comparison. The flight might take just an hour or so, at just a faction of the combined cost of train tickets and accommodation, but it leaves a devastating ‘tail’ of destruction. The train journey, by contrast, takes considerable effort and endurance whilst touching the land lightly.

Critically, travel by train is a revealing first hand insight into land use, and more so the heavy toll of destruction human activity places on the face of the planet. There is literally nothing untouched or preserved as we bullet our way through fields, mines, farmland, factories, reservoirs, over bridges and through tunnels. Town after town, city after city is but a blur through the window. Unlike flight, disconnected from the planet surface in an abstract manner where there are no stories nor truths revealed, the train journey connects city ‘CENTRE’ to city ‘CENTRE’, linking all the space between and demonstrating that these is no physical distinction between places…just endless and unbroken human endeavour.?

One challenge of slow travel is to work out how long you can reasonably go in any single stretch. Around 10 hours with multiple changes is my threshold…which means to get to Copenhagen (a trip of circa 14-19 hours) you have to ‘stop off’ and ‘kip for the night’ somewhere. On this trip, Cologne was our temporary camp on the way out (a tough, edgy, dirty city with a gargantuan Cathedral at its heart, and one of the most war damaged cities in Europe rendering much of its history as a memory) and Hamburg on the return trip (an extraordinary manifestation of European power, of wealth, of urban planning on a simply unimaginable scale, of a fusion of ornamental history, industrial wealth and contemporary flair) before en extended stay in Amsterdam (a collage of punk and pomp, of buildings leaning into one another and, like Copenhagen, a city prioritising cycle travel over other forms).

I had varying recent experience of each city before this trip, and slow travel provided the opportunity to explore them all more. Hamburg left a lasting impression for its architecture; an incredible fortress like approach to edge conditions and streets. Vast precipices of massive masonry and adornment rhythmically lining streets and canals. Several thousand bridges (more than Venice, Amsterdam and London together) criss and cross from bank to bank.

And then of course there is the Elbphilharmonie, named after the Elbe River, measuring 110 meters in height, 10 years to build and costing almost 900,000,000 EUROS (original budget 77M euros). Housing two concert halls, a hotel and a restaurant, as well as residential apartments for permanent guests and a free to access public gallery at the junction between the brick base and the ephemeral crown. I perceived it as a soulless capitalist edifice in spite of the promise of programme and its formal response to the river. And more so, that vanity projects of this scale, complexity and wilful disregard of the global plights we found ourselves, are so at odds with the societal challenges we face.

And onto Amsterdam. What a city. Wonky buildings. Cycling. Canals. Bridges. More bikes. Ferries. Trams: a joyful barrel roll of a three day tour, north and south of the river IJ, Amsterdam’s lifeblood, through Noorderpark, Westerpark, Vondelpark, along the tight streets fanning out from the canal networks around Jordaan, taking in the views from the A’DAM lookout.

Our final leg, a ‘Boris Bike’ from London St Pancras placed us back into deepest darkest Hackney. In its own way, a collage of many memorable fragments of our Figure of 8 Slow Circuit.