Danish design in context β¦ architecture, design, style and travel in the Nordic countries. Some of the courtyards, particularly in the 18th-century part of the city, were large and filled with gardens and others had the stables and carriage houses of the grand residences along the street frontage.
Some courtyards, particularly in the older parts of the city, had store rooms and workshops but many were packed tightly with buildings that were crowded with people renting just one or two rooms and the alleys and courts could be dark, full of washing and stench, and with little light or air reaching the lower rooms.
Photographs from the late 19th century show washing strung across from side to side, ladders and carts, timber piled up and channels in the cobbles to take away water and worse. Water must have been drawn from wells or come from fountains and pumps in the street. Anything more disgusting and miserable than these huts is hard to imagine β¦the shared characteristic of these buildings is decrepitude and limited conditions, which allows the sin and dirt the most excellent conditions for a fertile life The first thing, which stops the visitor is the darkness and the stench from the gutter or the filth in the yard.
Light can only be mentioned once you have elevated a little and the air in these back building residences never gets sufficient renewal. If you are curious to seek out the street, the buildings there were demolished sometime after and if the ghosts of the women and their pimps are to be seen anywhere it will be in the Danish Film Institute built on the site. In the s - so shortly before the outbreak of cholera in the city - the population of Copenhagen has been calculated to have been about , people but of course then Copenhagen was much smaller than now - just the inner city, the new town around the royal palace and Christianshavn.
Both the latter areas were relatively spacious with large houses and both Holmen and Gammelholm, south of Kongens Nytorv, were working docks and ship building yards so few lived in those parts. There were probably getting on for , people living in that area.
