When the Harbour Was Out of Bounds
For a long stretch of the harbour’s life, that invitation would have been against the rules. Swimming was banned from 1954 until 2002. Ships kept using the waterfront, but people were no longer allowed to join them in the water. The reason lay less in what could be seen from the quay than in what entered the harbour beneath it.
Rain made a difficult situation worse. When a downpour overloaded Copenhagen’s sewers, old outfalls discharged rainwater mixed with sewage into the harbour. Oil and industrial waste had also reached the water over the years. Cleaning a quay could make it pleasant to stand beside; it could do very little about what the drains delivered after rain.
A bollard tells you what a vessel can tie up to. A ladder tells you where a person might get in. For years, a ladder had no place beside a bollard.
The Colosseum Below the Street
On a wet day the interesting part of this story lies under your shoes. HOFOR, Copenhagen’s utility, built large underground basins to hold water when the sewer network came under pressure. Instead of sending the excess straight through the old outlets, the city could keep it back until the pipes had room to carry it away. Many of the overflow outfalls were closed as the work went on.
Think of the basin as a waiting room with no windows. Above it, the ordinary street carries on. Below, rainwater has somewhere to go other than the harbour. The engineering has none of the drama of a new waterfront building, which may explain why the finished result looks so unlikely to visitors: no great barrier separates the swimming water from the surrounding harbour.
HOFOR has a basin nicknamed the Colosseum. That is a heroic name for a chamber whose job is to keep water from making an entrance. It takes the force out of a downpour, then waits for the sewers to recover.
A Swimming Place on an Industrial Quay
Islands Brygge gives that hidden work a very visible result. The harbour bath began on a former industrial quay, with a temporary structure placed directly in the harbour. People did not have to wait for Copenhagen to create a new lake or pipe water into a conventional pool. They had water in front of them already. They needed a way into it.
The temporary bath was later moved across the harbour. Islands Brygge received a permanent replacement by the architects PLOT, whose timber decks and platforms meet the open water rather than trying to disguise it. Seen from the quay, the bath has something of a vessel about it: there are edges to sit on, steps to climb and water on the far side of the railings.
The ladder is such an unceremonious end to an elaborate project. A bather can sit above the water, take off their shoes and use the metal rungs.
The Flag Has the Last Word
Stand beside a bathing place and look for the signal before you look for swimmers. Copenhagen’s authorities check the water at its designated bathing sites daily. The green signal says the quality is suitable for bathing; red means leave the water alone. For a city that spent years making the harbour fit for a dip, the flag is a refreshingly unsentimental final detail.
The colour can change after very heavy rain, when a bathing area may need to close while the harbour water is renewed. The holding basins have made it manageable, and the tests can still tell people when the answer is no.
By & Havn, the harbour company, points out that water outside the marked bathing zones is not tested in the same way. The distinction is easy to miss when the water looks continuous from the quay.
Boats Have Not Given Up the Harbour
Late autumn makes Islands Brygge easier to read as a harbour again. The summer bathers have largely gone from the decks, while vessels still use the water and the quays still mark the edge of a working port. The ladders remain attached to a place that has not stopped being useful to boats just because people discovered they could swim beside them.
Some Copenhageners keep bathing through the colder months with winter swimming clubs. Many of the other bathing places are associated with summer.
On a quiet quay, the ladder may have nobody on it. The metal rungs make the harbour look easy to enter. The city beneath the pavement has to keep earning that ease.
