Braunschweig; Friday, 08 September, 2023

I had a relatively early breakfast before heading out of the hotel and back over to Hannover Hauptbahnhof to pick up my train over to Braunschweig. The journey was uneventful and we arrived on time. I quickly found the left luggage lockers in the station and dropped my bag off, as it was still over 4 hours until checkin started at the hotel, and then caught the tram into the centre of town.

Schloß appeared as good a tramstop as any other to hop off at and from there I had a wander around the historic centre of the city, starting with the former palace. The current building is the fourth rebuild on the site with the first palace having been burnt down by rioting, the second one burning down due to an electrical fault and the third one being bombed to destruction in 1944. The site was left as a ruin until the 1960s when it was eventually pulled down. The foundations for a new palace were laid down in 2005 with the current building going up very quickly – mostly helped by the fact that whilst the façade was designed to be a replica of the previous palace the interior was designed as a shopping centre, so no need to design lots of intricate rooms and corridors – just a big open hanger to build shops in. Down one side of the shopping centre complex there is a small museum which houses recreations of a couple of the rooms from the previous palaces, including the throne room of the Dukes of Braunschweig, and I spent a bit of time looking round the rooms.

From the palace I headed further into the old town proper, stopping off at the Burgplatz right in the heart of the city, though at the time of visiting mostly filled with the stage and seating for open-air opera performances. Next door is the city’s cathedral the Braunschweiger Dom, which I popped into for a quick look around, including down into the Royal crypt beneath the altar – the final resting place of many of the Dukes of Braunschweig.

I stopped for a quick lunch overlooking the castle before heading back into the old town and over to the Altstadtmarkt and the Altstadtrathaus. The market and town hall, along with St Martini Church are one of five sets of market, town hall and church that used to exist in the city as at one point it had five boroughs – each with their own market square, town hall and cathedral. Eventually this proved to be a little excessive and the decision as taken to focus on having just the one, and this area was chosen to be the home to the city’s main functions.

Today the square looks very pretty with the medieval buildings of the church, town hall and former cloth hall, along with a handful of half-timber houses. Of course, it’s all a recreation as the city was close to totally destroyed during the second world war, in part due to the number of half-timber buildings that had still existed at that point, so when a firestorm from incendiary bombs hit the city it tore through most of the buildings leaving nothing.

The old town hall is now also a branch of the city museum housing an impressive model of the city as it was at the start of the 16th century – complete with all five markets and town halls – as well as exhibits charting the history of the city from it’s founding around the 900’s through to the second world war.

After taking in the museum and the square I headed over to the bus stop with the intention of looking at the map to see the quickest route back to the tram stop to head back to the station to collect my luggage, but as luck would have it just as I arrived a bus going to the Hauptbahnhof pulled up so I hopped on that instead and headed over to the station to collect my bags. A quick check on Google maps showed that due to the one way system in the centre of town the same route coming back from the station stopped right outside my hotel, so with my bags I hopped back on the bus going back the opposite direction and headed over to my hotel to checkin.

After checking in and freshening up I headed out for a bit of a wander around some of the other areas of central Braunschweig, including taking in the Alte Waage – a reconstructed half-timber building that used to house the city’s official weighing and storage station for goods going to market.

I spent quite a bit of time just wandering around the centre of town before stopping off for a bite to eat in a restaurant on one of the many squares in the old town and then heading back to my hotel.