Robert Hampton

Friday morning we decided to do a walking tour of Hamburg. Every day at 11am a tour sets off, taking around two hours to take in some of the sights of the city. The tour starts at the Rathaus (City Hall), one of the many impressive buildings to be found in the city centre.

In the square outside some sort of inter-schools concert was being held. Children of varying ages filed in and sat themselves down on folding chairs, to be entertained by other children. Well, I say “entertained” – we escaped just as a group of teenagers started rapping (badly).

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Apologies for the delay in posting the next instalment. I have been quite busy recently!

Our Saturday morning in Hamburg was something I had been looking forward to for a long time – our visit to Miniatur Wunderland, the world’s largest model railway (bigger even than Rod Stewart’s).

Miniatur Wunderland is so popular that you generally have to prebook an admission slot, especially at weekends. This was something we had neglected to do, but after a little bit of wrangling with our hotel’s computer terminal and its intermittent wi-fi connection, I had a printed PDF voucher which would allow us to gain entry between 10.30 and 11.30 (once you’re in, you can stay as long as you like).

Miniatur Wunderland is spread across two floors of a giant warehouse in the Speicerstadt area of the city. When we first arrived at the Wunderland building, there was a brief bit of misdirection where we walked into what appeared to be a fire escape (we only noticed our mistake after going up three flights of stairs).

With our pre-booked voucher we were quickly inside the main building, and on to the models themselves.

I have been to plenty of model railway shows (I’m still single, fellas!) but I wasn’t quite prepared for this. One of the first things you see when you enter the exhibition is a breathtaking model of the Alps, with mountains so tall that balconies have been installed above so you can see them from below.

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It amused me, recently, to see John Whittingdale give a speech at the Conservative Party conference in which he praised the success of British artists and performers. “There are no German Beatles,” he noted.

That last sentence amused me, because while the Beatles are indeed British (hailing as they do from every Tory’s favourite city, Liverpool), it was in Germany that they honed their craft. They were in Hamburg on and off for over two years, returning to the UK in 1962 with a lot more performing experience and much better prepared for the global superstardom that awaited. Hamburg airport has a quote from John Lennon on display: “I may have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg”. In summary, John Whittingdale is an idiot.

All of which leads into my Saturday night in Hamburg, which started at Beatles-Platz, where this cool statue of the fab four is on display.

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