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Block D – Culture and entertainment

Block D of the red-brick Speicherstadt historical warehouse district is known as the Event Warehouse. Most tenants here are companies in the entertainment industry. Among them is Germany’s best-known tourist attraction – Miniatur Wunderland.

The address at Kehrwieder 2–7 is probably more familiar to tourists than to Hamburg locals since it is home to the Event Warehouse in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt historical warehouse district. It certainly is the most visited building in the red-brick ensemble. The building, named Warehouse Block D according to the traditional system, was built between 1885 and 1889 during the Speicherstadt’s first construction phase, and is therefore one of the oldest of the red-brick warehouses.

Typical building of the first construction phase

This warehouse building is typical of the first phase of construction. Designed by urban architects Andreas Meyer and Georg Thielen from the construction department of HHLA’s predecessor HFLG, it housed not only the typical commercial tenants of the time but also a post office. On the square facing the red-brick buildings, coachmen waited with their wagons until all formalities had been completed.

Event Warehouse

All kinds of vehicles continue to park in front of the imposing warehouses today, though their drivers are mostly looking for entertainment. The current tenants of Block D are companies such as Stage Entertainment, which produces diverse musicals in the port of Hamburg. Other tenants include a school for future musical performers, the Hamburg Dungeon, a coffee roasting house and a small theatre. And of course, the Miniatur Wunderland model railway.

In the Wunderland, Germany’s best-known tourist attraction, 1,040 trains, 269,000 figures and 9,250 cars run on nearly 16,000 metres of tracks on a model surface of around 1,500 square metres. Since its opening in August 2001, millions of visitors have turned the magical miniature world into Germany’s most famous tourist attraction – even before Neuschwanstein Castle.

Block D is slowly getting to be too small for Miniatur Wunderland’s continued development. Therefore, the tourist attraction – together with HHLA – is constructing an elaborate bridge across the Brook canal. There, in Block L, a miniature South America is being built.