Glory days at an (East) Berlin race track

Leave a reply

.

“I want to tell you I’m not here for or against any government. I came to play rock ‘n’ roll for you East Berliners in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.” – Bruce Springsteen in Berlin, 1988

The race track in the north of Weißensee was once home to trap- and cycle-racing, but on July 19th 1988 it became the location for one of those events where even people who saw it on television felt they had been part of something special. Over a hundred and fifty thousand East Berliners packed into the Rennbahn – way over capacity – to watch a concert from Bruce Springsteen.

For the Communist authorities to allow the invitation of an American rock star to cross the wall to put a show on in the East might seem like a strange decision, but as a songwriter who often highlighted the plight of the working man it was felt that “the Boss” was ideologically sound. Unfortunately for the regime, and as this Reuters article marking the twentieth anniversary a couple of years ago shows, it did not quite turn out like that:

Continue reading →

Traces in the Landscape – The Bergslagen, Sweden

2 Replies

We booked a house in Sweden more or less at random. We knew we wanted to be somewhere north of Vimmerby, and within a couple of hours of Stockholm. The house we found  by the Järleån river was about halfway between the towns of Nora and Lindesberg, less than an hour’s drive north of the university city of Örebro. We made that drive for the first time through driving rain, the windscreen wipers working overtime to keep the street ahead somewhat visible. What we could see, through the blurred windows and the spray of passing trucks was a landscape of thick forests, the occasionally rocky outcrop, and the knowledge that somewhere, amongst the trees, were hundreds of lakes, great and small.

What was not immediately clear was the influence on the landscape of centuries of mining, of forestry and iron production, that made this region – known as the Bergslagen – the resource-rich heart of Swedish industry. The Bergslagen is a place where Alfred Nöbel had a dynamite factory, with three-metre thick walls to survive an accidental explosion of the product, and which was used to excavate the earth. In the eighteenth century a quarter of all of Europe’s iron production came from hundreds of small foundries in the region. We met an English guy who is working in the region, and he told us that mines and mining remain an important industry, although the number of employees needed is down from its peak and many of the mines have been long abandoned and the scarred landscape returned to some form of nature.

Continue reading →

Revitalising remote communities: the idea of ‘sustainable tourism’

2 Replies

The following article is by Sharon Blackie originally appeared on the Earthlines Magazine blog and is a very interesting read for anyone interested in the challenges of balancing tourism, access and sustainability in some of our most beautiful areas. Many thanks to Sharon for allowing us permission to re-post it here:

When we moved to this most remote south-western corner of the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis in 2010, we did so precisely because of its remoteness. We were looking for a quiet place, as far as it is possible to get in this too-cluttered country from the consumption-driven madness of the ‘civilised’ world. One of the many reasons we loved this region called Uig was that it was still unspoilt by an excess of tourism. Because, to us, the words ‘spoilt’ and ‘tourism’ have generally gone together. Tourism can be a very different thing from travelling. It can imply enormous camper vans that are too big for small single-track roads (too big even for their passing places) and that empty their chemical loos all over grazing land (yes, I know: not all camper van owners are so inconsiderate, but sadly many are); too-fast too-impatient cars driving at breakneck never-enough-time city speed, mowing down lambs as they go. It can imply too much inappropriate development – development that exploits a place rather than teaching people to respect and treasure it. It can imply curious people stopping and staring through your fence at you when you’re working on the croft as if you were some kind of museum piece or in a petting zoo. It can imply coachloads of tourists buying up mugs and teatowels that are mass-produced by children in China. It can imply stepping out of the car for a moment and ‘looking at the view’ – or photgraphing it – rather than truly putting yourself into a wild place and going with the flow. In short, it can imply damaging – to the environment, to the culture of a place, and to the inhabitants of that place getting on with doing their work.

I understand that I’ve focused on just one type of tourist experience in the previous paragraph. I understand that by no means all tourists are like this, and that walkers and many other travellers certainly are not. But I’ve lived in a couple of other remote and beautiful places where tourists have a tendency to take over for a good 50% of the year, and if your livelihood doesn’t depend on tourists and yet you’re still trying to manage animals and run a business, the all-too-frequent thoughtlessness can be immensely frustrating and so colours your perception.

Continue reading →

Journey through the north of Berlin

Leave a reply

We spent our first weekend back in the German capital on our bikes, riding from one lovely meal to the next, from Wedding through the north of Prenzlauer Berg and Weißensee to Hohenschönhausen, and then back through Heinersdorf to Pankow. We did this little tour over two days, and after four weeks of enjoying the Swedish countryside it was a timely reminder of why living in a city such as Berlin can be such an interesting and rewarding experience.

In many ways our bike trip was very ordinary. We set off with a destination, rather than a route in mind, and with little legs working the pedals furiously it was more important to be direct rather than scenic or interesting. But still, in those 20-odd kilometres of Berlin streets and pathways we crossed the old Berlin Wall via the place where it first opened on that famous November evening in 1989, skirted the fringes of a neighbourhood street festival, and rocked and rolled along the cobblestones between three of the city’s most lovely lakes.

Continue reading →

Farewell to Sweden

3 Replies

…but hello to Berlin and the return of Under a Grey Sky. We hope that there will be lots of other wonderful tales of adventures beyond the front door to come as normal service is resumed.

On the final morning in Sweden we were sitting by a lake somewhere in the south of the country, at a campsite we had discovered the previous evening once we had reached over halfway in our journey between Stockholm and our ferry port at Trelleborg. It was a beautiful and quiet spot, a basic camp site with just a few pitches for caravans and those monster mobile homes, and a reception that doubled up as a kiosk for the mini golf. No-one was playing in the morning, as most of the nearby town were at school or work and the campers were still having breakfast on the grass or the balcony of their mobile home.

I opened my notebook to jot down some thoughts and I was struck by how little I had written during the three and half weeks in Sweden. Perhaps it was because I knew that I would be coming here once we returned to Berlin, to write about the different places and experiences on Under a Grey Sky so there was no need to commit any thoughts to paper. In any case, over the next few weeks there will be a number of different posts about our time in Sweden, plus other interesting things that have been collected and submitted whilst I was away.

Continue reading →

Taking the slow road north

3 Replies

This will be the last article on Under a Grey Sky for four weeks, as we close up the shutters for our summer holiday. When we started back in the dead time between Christmas and New Year, I wasn’t sure how far or how long we would go. I knew that I would need support, both from readers and contributors in order to create the type of website that I was aiming for. I wanted Under a Grey Sky to be collaborative project, and eight months on when I look down the list of contributors and have a read through the archives, I think that we have achieved this.

I am hoping that by the time we open things up for business once more, the Grey Sky inbox will be filled with words and pictures from the diverse and dispersed group of friends around the world. And hopefully Katrin and I will have our own stories to tell from our journey north to Sweden. It is exciting, because for the first time since our daughter was born we are camping during the drive to a small house on the edge of a forest, and as with our trip to Paris via Saarbrücken earlier in the year, the journey is once again part of the excitement of the trip, not just the destination.

Continue reading →

A walk through the woods, Schorfheide

4 Replies

With each turn off the road dropped a category, from autobahn to overland street, to village lane, to dirt track. We were invited to a cabin on the edge of the forest, for a summer party around an open fire even if it was punctuated with bursts of rain. We stole the only solid dry hour of the afternoon to take a walk in the woods, following one of our hosts along the trails between the birch and pine trees, whilst the kids picked their way through the trees and the undergrowth. We were penetrating just a little way into the Schorfheide, one of Germany’s largest forests and part of the UNESCO-protected Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere, that starts about fifty kilometres north of the Berlin city limits.

Continue reading →

Roadside Britain

Leave a reply

In Toby Litt’s debut novel “Beatniks” the characters are driving from Bedford to Brighton when one of them exclaims: “England is such a small island. You drive to the edge, then all you can do is stop. There is nowhere else to go… I want to keep going. I never want to stop. North, south, east, west – I don’t care. Just get me off this island! Take me away! Take me to America!”

It is hard to image a British road novel or movie in the tradition of our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, but Britain has its own traditional roadside culture, tied in to place and environment that can be every bit as iconic as Route 66 or a bedraggled Jack Kerouac thumbing a lift.

Continue reading →

St. George’s Market, Belfast

2 Replies

Markets have been something of a theme on Under a Grey Sky in recent weeks. Thanks to Barry Sheppard for his exploration of the St George’s indoor market in Belfast:

St George’s is situated in the south east corner of Belfast city centre, a stone’s throw away from the relatively recently redeveloped waterfront area.  I know it is a stone’s throw away because many a stone has been thrown in this general area over the years.  However, on a relatively sunny Sunday morning in a more placid era the cycle from home to the market is a somewhat more pleasant experience.

The market is well over 100 years old, having been commissioned by The Belfast Corporation in 1890 and completed in three stages by 1896.  The market is one of my oldest and fondest memories of Belfast.  In the very early 80s I remember quite vividly being brought to the market by my mother and being amazed by the sheer size, smells and colours of the place.  What amazed me most of all was the swarm of strange and unusual faces, not that there was anything Picasso-esque about Belfast people in those days.  It was just exciting as a four year old to see that many people in the one place towering over me going about their business.  The place was a great spot for people watching, a pastime that I’m still partial to today.

Continue reading →

Sick note and a street festival

Leave a reply

Apologies for the silence. I have been sick for a few days, missing the sunshine and other fun and games, and I did not even have the energy to update the site and add the new posts that I have in the pipeline, waiting. Normal service should be resumed in the next couple of days, but in the meantime I have a gallery of photographs from the Bergmannstraße street festival that took place down in Kreuzberg last weekend. One of the things about Berlin is that a lot of neighbourhoods take their identities from specific streets, and some of those streets celebrate their unique identities and communities through festivals such as this one.

Continue reading →