Easter isn’t the best time to visit Stockholm. The trees are bare and the weather can be drab and chilly, but the weather couldn’t dampen our enthusiasm for the capital of Sweden.
I actually had very few preconceptions about it. I knew it as a city of water, islands and ludicrously priced alcohol. I knew it as home to the strange heroine of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, Lisbeth Salander and, of course, Abba. But that was about it. During our long weekend we never did find Lisbeth or her journalist friend Mikael Blomkvist, let alone anyone resembling Abba’s hit-makers, but we did find a glorious city built on water and scary bar bills. After spending a few days we left rating Stockholm highly. It offered us a bit of everything, embraced the future as much as its past and was lively enough to keep us busy into the early hours, with a surprisingly good foodie scene and a safe and friendly vibe.
We based ourselves in Gamla Stan on the island of Stadsholmen, the historic heart of the city. It’s a district of alleyways and ancient buildings as well as tourist-tastic streets and buzzing shops. Venturing out for a walk in the drizzle of a Good Friday morning, we were struck by the grand buildings lining the waterways beyond. This is a city that, in the past at least, celebrated power with buildings on an imperial and monumental scale.
Gamla Stan is definitely the most popular district with tourists but we quickly learned to avoid the main drag of Västerlånggatan and its key arteries. Hidden down the streets away from the worst of the crowds are delightful cafes and bakeries, attractive houses and apartments, stately churches and stylish boutiques. Unlike some other European cities, we saw little litter or graffiti. The district remains the seat of power, rich in history. The main square, Stortorget, is dominated by delightful old merchants’ homes and was the site of the Stockholm Bloodbath, an early 16th century massacre of Swedish noblemen by the Danish King Christian II. This in turn brought about a revolt and civil war, followed by the rise of Swedish power. Things were a bit more peaceful during our stay.
Elsewhere in Gamla Stan is the huge and austere Kungliga slottet, the Royal Palace. From the size of it, and it really is massive, the building must have hundreds of rooms but around a dozen or so of the state apartments were open to the public on our visit. They are, of course, grand and pompous, lit by over-the-top chandeliers, stuffed with fine art and furnishings but little different from any other royal palace in Europe.
Sweden is one of the few European countries that hasn’t abolished, beheaded or exiled their royals. However, the king and his family tend to spend most of their time a few miles out of town, away from the rabble in the attractive Drottningholm’s Palace. We caught a train and a bus to get there but didn’t realise until later that we could’ve caught a ferry from the city centre.
The entrance to the palace is an extravagant pile of marble, and the rooms an odd mixture of the exceptionally grand and the humble. The grounds, which must be beautiful in summer, were lost in a wintry mist.
Back to the city we went and on another day, with blue skies as a backdrop, took to the water using the city’s excellent ferry service to get to the island of Djurgården and the open-air Skansen museum. No doubt with a family in tow this oddly old-fashioned attraction would be a real winner but for an old cynic like me it was a weird place that can’t quite work out what it wants to be. Zoo? Fairground? History lesson? Take your pick. The best bits are the historic buildings – cottages, churches, windmills and the like – that have been rescued from destruction and rebuilt on the site to give an idea of what village life was like in the four corners of Sweden in centuries past. Perhaps everything would’ve looked better in the full bloom of summer, without the light dusting of wintry snow, but there’s no denying the effort that’s been put into saving the nation’s heritage.
A short distance away from Skansen and hidden away in a monstrously unattractive building is what I reckon to be the finest attraction in the city. The Vasa is an historic warship that was built in the 17th century, but it sank rapidly on its debut. After being recovered remarkably intact in the 1960s, it was moved to a specially built museum. We did the tour and had a couple of (expensive) beers and a plate of Swedish meatballs in the excellent cafe afterwards.
That set us up nicely for a beer and some tasty Swedish home cooking at Restaurant Pelikan that evening. It’s a glorious old beer hall not far from the Skanstull metro station, and we tucked into a delicious and substantial pork knuckle.
We spent the next day experiencing the old and the new of Stockholm. On the one hand there’s the City Hall, a magnificent red-brick building in the national romantic style that hosts the annual Nobel Prize ceremonies. We took a guided tour and discovered a building of extraordinary variety, rooms that offer anything from Renaissance touches to art deco. The Golden Hall is the highlight – a masterpiece of mosaic and gold with Gaudiesque touches.
A short hop on the metro took us to the Fotografiska Museet, which opened as a centre for contemporary photography in 2010 in a stylish (and also red brick) industrial art nouveau building. It’s got a cafe with great views and a well-stocked shop.
We spent our final evening in Sodermalm, a busy and lively district with some good eateries and bars (from the noisy and drunken to the cosmopolitan). We lodged ourselves in the friendly and funky Urban Deli – a cross between an up-market food shop, restaurant and bar. But funky or not, the beers still cost an arm and a leg.
And would we go back? You bet. But we’ll do it in summer next time.