The story of this place
When Hamburg joined the German customs union in 1888, the city cleared entire neighbourhoods and displaced 20,000 people to build the Speicherstadt, a purpose-built free port district of red-brick Gothic-revival warehouses standing on thousands of oak foundation piles driven into the marsh. For over a century, traders stored the goods of empire here — coffee, tea, cocoa, spices, tobacco and the world's largest stock of hand-knotted oriental carpets. The warehouses were built tall and narrow with hoists to haul cargo by canal. Firestorms of the 1943 Allied bombing gutted much of it, but it was rebuilt. Since 2015 the Speicherstadt has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its canals now home to the vast HafenCity redevelopment.