Michael Ridpath's Blog - Posts Tagged "reykjavik"
Favourite Places: Thingholt
By ‘Thingholt’, I mean the bloody great hill in the middle of Reykjavík with a church on top. I assume that in Viking times, they held one of those ‘thingi’ things here, meaning an assembly.
It’s bordered by the Tjörnin pond on the west, Laugavegur to the north, the National Hospital to the east and the City airport to the south. It’s a residential area bang in the middle of town, full of small houses with brightly painted corrugated iron roofs — predominantly red, but also green and blue. The walls are either concrete or corrugated iron, and many are brightly painted too.
Most of the houses with corrugated metal walls were built between 1880 and 1925. The rain in Reykjavík frequently falls horizontally, so wooden walls tended to rot. Wood was also expensive, since it all had to be imported, and it burns: much of Reykjavík burned down in 1915. Corrugated iron was all the rage until the Icelanders discovered concrete in the 1920s.
The dwellings are small, with little gables and tiny gardens behind picket fences. The place is delightfully, domestically, quiet: the roads are too narrow for Reykjavík’s traffic to make much headway. There are primary schools and playgrounds, corner shops and bicycles.
The western slope, rising up from the Tjörnin, seems to have the oldest houses, built by Reykjavík merchants in the nineteenth century. Old in Thingholt means quaint, rather than grand. The houses to the south are a little grander; this is where the Reykjavík bigwigs live, and you might spot the odd security camera. The slope to the north above Laugavegur is hipper and quirkier, and to the east it is a bit scruffier. This is where Magnus lives. I was told that Thingholt would be a little too Bohemian for a policeman, so I had him lodge with one of his colleagues’ punkish sister. Their house is a lovely little building with grey painted corrugated iron walls and a red door on Njálsgata — I know exactly which one.
No one can agree exactly where Thingolt's borders run; according to the more pedantic residents, Njálsgata may lie just outside its limits. Which sounds about right for Magnus.
When Julian Assange and his colleagues from Wikileaks came to Iceland to edit the video of an American operation in Iraq, which had been leaked to them, they stayed in a house in Thingholt. My third Magnus novel, Meltwater, features a similar outfit who also holed up in a little house on the hill.
I have mentioned the terrific view from the top of the Hallgrímskirkja, but the views snatched strolling around the hill are perhaps better because more unexpected. Between a child’s swing and a rowan tree, you suddenly catch a glimpse of Mount Esja, or the Tjörnin, or the Pearl — the water tower to the south of town, or much closer, the swooping spire of the church itself.
Skólavördustígur is a road that heads straight uphill to the Hallgrímskirkja from the bottom of Laugavegur. The name is a mouthful, an effort to read, let alone pronounce, so think of it as the Skola Street. This is where you catch the best view of the church, always shifting with the time of day and the weather.
The street itself is lined with galleries, some unashamedly touristy, but some selling pieces that are fascinating, quirky, stunning or all three. The various rocks, metals and glass spewed up by Iceland’s volcanoes are popular materials, as is fish-skin leather.
The Handknitting Association of Iceland, up the hill on the left, contains an extraordinary collection of wool garments, including the famous lopapeysa sweaters. These are made of wool from Icelandic sheep that have two layers, a wet-resistant outer layer and an insulating inner layer. The sweaters are warm and weatherproof, but sell for the kind of price that prompts you to consider selling your first-born in order to clothe your second-born, or vice versa.
It’s bordered by the Tjörnin pond on the west, Laugavegur to the north, the National Hospital to the east and the City airport to the south. It’s a residential area bang in the middle of town, full of small houses with brightly painted corrugated iron roofs — predominantly red, but also green and blue. The walls are either concrete or corrugated iron, and many are brightly painted too.
Most of the houses with corrugated metal walls were built between 1880 and 1925. The rain in Reykjavík frequently falls horizontally, so wooden walls tended to rot. Wood was also expensive, since it all had to be imported, and it burns: much of Reykjavík burned down in 1915. Corrugated iron was all the rage until the Icelanders discovered concrete in the 1920s.
The dwellings are small, with little gables and tiny gardens behind picket fences. The place is delightfully, domestically, quiet: the roads are too narrow for Reykjavík’s traffic to make much headway. There are primary schools and playgrounds, corner shops and bicycles.
The western slope, rising up from the Tjörnin, seems to have the oldest houses, built by Reykjavík merchants in the nineteenth century. Old in Thingholt means quaint, rather than grand. The houses to the south are a little grander; this is where the Reykjavík bigwigs live, and you might spot the odd security camera. The slope to the north above Laugavegur is hipper and quirkier, and to the east it is a bit scruffier. This is where Magnus lives. I was told that Thingholt would be a little too Bohemian for a policeman, so I had him lodge with one of his colleagues’ punkish sister. Their house is a lovely little building with grey painted corrugated iron walls and a red door on Njálsgata — I know exactly which one.
No one can agree exactly where Thingolt's borders run; according to the more pedantic residents, Njálsgata may lie just outside its limits. Which sounds about right for Magnus.
When Julian Assange and his colleagues from Wikileaks came to Iceland to edit the video of an American operation in Iraq, which had been leaked to them, they stayed in a house in Thingholt. My third Magnus novel, Meltwater, features a similar outfit who also holed up in a little house on the hill.
I have mentioned the terrific view from the top of the Hallgrímskirkja, but the views snatched strolling around the hill are perhaps better because more unexpected. Between a child’s swing and a rowan tree, you suddenly catch a glimpse of Mount Esja, or the Tjörnin, or the Pearl — the water tower to the south of town, or much closer, the swooping spire of the church itself.
Skólavördustígur is a road that heads straight uphill to the Hallgrímskirkja from the bottom of Laugavegur. The name is a mouthful, an effort to read, let alone pronounce, so think of it as the Skola Street. This is where you catch the best view of the church, always shifting with the time of day and the weather.
The street itself is lined with galleries, some unashamedly touristy, but some selling pieces that are fascinating, quirky, stunning or all three. The various rocks, metals and glass spewed up by Iceland’s volcanoes are popular materials, as is fish-skin leather.
The Handknitting Association of Iceland, up the hill on the left, contains an extraordinary collection of wool garments, including the famous lopapeysa sweaters. These are made of wool from Icelandic sheep that have two layers, a wet-resistant outer layer and an insulating inner layer. The sweaters are warm and weatherproof, but sell for the kind of price that prompts you to consider selling your first-born in order to clothe your second-born, or vice versa.
Checking out Reykjavík: walking where my characters walk
I checked out Reykjavík. I was looking for places people might live, places people might meet, and the odd place someone might get stabbed or shot. It’s a bit morbid, but it’s my job.
I was to revisit all the spots I saw on this first trip many times over the following ten years. In May 2008, the global financial crash was just beginning its downward lurch. It was to hit Iceland particularly hard over the following twelve months.
I started where Ingólfur Arnarson started, in Austurvöllur Square, which is a couple of hundred yards south of the bay and in the middle of what is now known as ‘Downtown’.
Austurvöllur is a bit of a mouthful, so let’s call it the Parliament Square, since Parliament is on one side. If you think Reykjavík is small for a capital city now, this is where you realize how seriously small it used to be a hundred years ago.
The square is a patch of green with a statue of a politician in the middle, some scrappy grass and daffodils and a few benches. The parliament building itself looks like the town hall of a small Yorkshire town, complete with blackened stone. And, of course, a hundred years ago Reykjavík was the same size as a small Yorkshire town.
The square has seen some action. A year after I visited for the first time it was the site of the ‘pots-and-pans’ revolution, when five per cent of the country’s population would crowd into the square and bang crockery to demand change. It worked: the government toppled and fell.
On the side of the square is the Hótel Borg, which was for a long time Reykjavík’s only posh hotel. It was built by a famous Icelandic strongman in the 1930s — when they say that I assume they mean he financed it, but maybe he used his own hands. It’s grand in an understated art deco way, and a perfect place for my wealthy Tolkien-besotted American character to stay while he is visiting Reykjavík.
On a third side of the square is the Café Paris, which is a place to see Iceland’s great and good, and an excellent place for lunch and a coffee. Politicians are frequent patrons, although, given the scandal I mentioned in a previous post, you may want to avoid listening in too closely to their conversations.
Just to the south of the parliament square is the Tjörnin, a large pond about a kilometre in length, access to which presumably attracted Ingólfur to this spot. (By the way, although I call it “the Tjörnin”, I really shouldn’t, since the “-in” at the end of “Tjörnin” already means “the”, so I am calling it “the the Tjörn”. It’s just one of those little things I like to do to annoy Icelanders).
This is not a man-made municipal water feature, but an important natural international transport hub. There is Keflavík International Airport, there is the City Airport in the middle of Reykjavík, and then there is the Tjörnin. It is the westernmost body of freshwater in Iceland, and hence a popular stopping-off point for birds on their migration. Swans, geese, ducks, terns, seagulls and a host of complicated species known only to twitchers paddle and fuss, refuelling for the next leg of their journey.
The modern Reykjavík town hall leans out over the lake. It’s worth a quick visit, especially on your return from a trip around the countryside, which you can trace on a massive model of a relief map of Iceland inside.
To the north-west of the parliament square is the Old Harbour, which used to be the only harbour until they built a new one for freight further east, but is still used by fishing boats. Reykjavík is still a serious fishing port and there is always a lot going on.
Tucked away near the water, in a patch of land which has been under intermittent construction for the last ten years, is Baejarins Beztu Pylsur, a red hot-dog stand with a picture of Bill Clinton stuffing his face outside it. It is just a hot-dog stand in a car park, but there is usually a queue, and although I think it’s a bit overblown to claim that the hot dogs are the best per-capita hot dogs in the world, they do taste good. One way or another, whenever I go to Iceland I seem to stop there. For the truly authentic Reykjavík experience it should be drizzling lightly.
The stand had a narrow escape recently. A nearby crane fell, just missed the stand, but destroyed a bench nearby a few seconds after two girls had just finished their hot dogs and left it.
As I walked along the edge of the bay eastwards, I passed a massive construction site. This was a planned concert hall, which cost a huge amount of money and was nearly cancelled during the financial crisis, but fortunately wasn’t.
It’s now finished, it’s called Harpa, and it’s beautiful. It’s like a large cubic jewel, gleaming and glimmering in greens, yellows, blues and purples. The façade was designed by the Icelandic artist Ólafur Eliasson, and is made out of glass bricks that reflect and refract sunlight so that the interior is always changing during the day, and at night is stunningly illuminated. Go inside and gawp.
The bay itself is known as Faxaflói and faces north. To the north-east loom the flanks of Esja. Far to the north, and I mean a hundred kilometres away, is Snaefellsnes, a peninsula that juts out to the west of Iceland. At the very end of this stands the volcano Snaefellsjökull, a perfect cone topped with an ice-cream glacier. On a clear day, you can see it from Reykjavík, hovering above the water in the distance.
Along the edge of the bay stand a row of tall apartment blocks. In 2008 they were only half-built, and construction stopped for a few years during the crash. The area is known as the ‘Shadow District’, and I decided it was an ideal place for a yuppy banker in my second novel to live. And there were some deserted narrow streets running between the buildings which would be great places for him to be attacked. Very useful.
The police station is close to the bay, and in fact, there is a good view from Magnus’s desk over to Snaefellsnes. The National Police Commissioner’s office is right on the bay too. But the area around the police station, known as Hlemmur, was a bit scruffy: bus station, tattoo parlours, dodgy shops, needles in back alleys.
During the crash, there were squats around here, and if you were to meet a strung-out junky in central Reykjavík, it would probably be around Hlemmur. It would be inaccurate to suggest it feels unsafe; all city centres have their scruffier parts, and this is, or was, Reykjavík’s.
Walking further east along the bay, I came to the Höfdi House. This is a white mansion standing in its own lawn by the side of the water. Icelanders don’t really do mansions, even rich people’s houses are small by international mansion standards, as indeed is the Höfdi House.
It was the smartest house in town in the first half of the century, and was nabbed by the British government for their consulate. The house had a ghost, named Sóley, who drove the British out and they sold the place in 1952.
Thirty years later it became the site of the famous disarmament talks between Reagan and Gorbachev. Apparently, the Russian delegates enjoyed watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in the basement: Russians didn’t get Tom and Jerry in Moscow in those days. It is now owned by the city, and is used for official functions.
Seemed to me a good spot for my characters to choose to meet.
Further on to the east, I came to Iceland’s equivalent of Wall Street, Borgartún. This is a straight road running parallel to the bay, lined with modern office buildings of glass and red and black stone a few stories high. Vanity Fair describes the style as ‘Asshole Capitalist’, but I think that’s a little harsh. Every capital city needs somewhere to put its banks, and with its views of Mount Esja and Faxaflói Bay and its manageably sized buildings, I suspect this would be a pretty good place to work. And for Magnus to meet a hotshot lawyer.
I was to revisit all the spots I saw on this first trip many times over the following ten years. In May 2008, the global financial crash was just beginning its downward lurch. It was to hit Iceland particularly hard over the following twelve months.
I started where Ingólfur Arnarson started, in Austurvöllur Square, which is a couple of hundred yards south of the bay and in the middle of what is now known as ‘Downtown’.
Austurvöllur is a bit of a mouthful, so let’s call it the Parliament Square, since Parliament is on one side. If you think Reykjavík is small for a capital city now, this is where you realize how seriously small it used to be a hundred years ago.
The square is a patch of green with a statue of a politician in the middle, some scrappy grass and daffodils and a few benches. The parliament building itself looks like the town hall of a small Yorkshire town, complete with blackened stone. And, of course, a hundred years ago Reykjavík was the same size as a small Yorkshire town.
The square has seen some action. A year after I visited for the first time it was the site of the ‘pots-and-pans’ revolution, when five per cent of the country’s population would crowd into the square and bang crockery to demand change. It worked: the government toppled and fell.
On the side of the square is the Hótel Borg, which was for a long time Reykjavík’s only posh hotel. It was built by a famous Icelandic strongman in the 1930s — when they say that I assume they mean he financed it, but maybe he used his own hands. It’s grand in an understated art deco way, and a perfect place for my wealthy Tolkien-besotted American character to stay while he is visiting Reykjavík.
On a third side of the square is the Café Paris, which is a place to see Iceland’s great and good, and an excellent place for lunch and a coffee. Politicians are frequent patrons, although, given the scandal I mentioned in a previous post, you may want to avoid listening in too closely to their conversations.
Just to the south of the parliament square is the Tjörnin, a large pond about a kilometre in length, access to which presumably attracted Ingólfur to this spot. (By the way, although I call it “the Tjörnin”, I really shouldn’t, since the “-in” at the end of “Tjörnin” already means “the”, so I am calling it “the the Tjörn”. It’s just one of those little things I like to do to annoy Icelanders).
This is not a man-made municipal water feature, but an important natural international transport hub. There is Keflavík International Airport, there is the City Airport in the middle of Reykjavík, and then there is the Tjörnin. It is the westernmost body of freshwater in Iceland, and hence a popular stopping-off point for birds on their migration. Swans, geese, ducks, terns, seagulls and a host of complicated species known only to twitchers paddle and fuss, refuelling for the next leg of their journey.
The modern Reykjavík town hall leans out over the lake. It’s worth a quick visit, especially on your return from a trip around the countryside, which you can trace on a massive model of a relief map of Iceland inside.
To the north-west of the parliament square is the Old Harbour, which used to be the only harbour until they built a new one for freight further east, but is still used by fishing boats. Reykjavík is still a serious fishing port and there is always a lot going on.
Tucked away near the water, in a patch of land which has been under intermittent construction for the last ten years, is Baejarins Beztu Pylsur, a red hot-dog stand with a picture of Bill Clinton stuffing his face outside it. It is just a hot-dog stand in a car park, but there is usually a queue, and although I think it’s a bit overblown to claim that the hot dogs are the best per-capita hot dogs in the world, they do taste good. One way or another, whenever I go to Iceland I seem to stop there. For the truly authentic Reykjavík experience it should be drizzling lightly.
The stand had a narrow escape recently. A nearby crane fell, just missed the stand, but destroyed a bench nearby a few seconds after two girls had just finished their hot dogs and left it.
As I walked along the edge of the bay eastwards, I passed a massive construction site. This was a planned concert hall, which cost a huge amount of money and was nearly cancelled during the financial crisis, but fortunately wasn’t.
It’s now finished, it’s called Harpa, and it’s beautiful. It’s like a large cubic jewel, gleaming and glimmering in greens, yellows, blues and purples. The façade was designed by the Icelandic artist Ólafur Eliasson, and is made out of glass bricks that reflect and refract sunlight so that the interior is always changing during the day, and at night is stunningly illuminated. Go inside and gawp.
The bay itself is known as Faxaflói and faces north. To the north-east loom the flanks of Esja. Far to the north, and I mean a hundred kilometres away, is Snaefellsnes, a peninsula that juts out to the west of Iceland. At the very end of this stands the volcano Snaefellsjökull, a perfect cone topped with an ice-cream glacier. On a clear day, you can see it from Reykjavík, hovering above the water in the distance.
Along the edge of the bay stand a row of tall apartment blocks. In 2008 they were only half-built, and construction stopped for a few years during the crash. The area is known as the ‘Shadow District’, and I decided it was an ideal place for a yuppy banker in my second novel to live. And there were some deserted narrow streets running between the buildings which would be great places for him to be attacked. Very useful.
The police station is close to the bay, and in fact, there is a good view from Magnus’s desk over to Snaefellsnes. The National Police Commissioner’s office is right on the bay too. But the area around the police station, known as Hlemmur, was a bit scruffy: bus station, tattoo parlours, dodgy shops, needles in back alleys.
During the crash, there were squats around here, and if you were to meet a strung-out junky in central Reykjavík, it would probably be around Hlemmur. It would be inaccurate to suggest it feels unsafe; all city centres have their scruffier parts, and this is, or was, Reykjavík’s.
Walking further east along the bay, I came to the Höfdi House. This is a white mansion standing in its own lawn by the side of the water. Icelanders don’t really do mansions, even rich people’s houses are small by international mansion standards, as indeed is the Höfdi House.
It was the smartest house in town in the first half of the century, and was nabbed by the British government for their consulate. The house had a ghost, named Sóley, who drove the British out and they sold the place in 1952.
Thirty years later it became the site of the famous disarmament talks between Reagan and Gorbachev. Apparently, the Russian delegates enjoyed watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in the basement: Russians didn’t get Tom and Jerry in Moscow in those days. It is now owned by the city, and is used for official functions.
Seemed to me a good spot for my characters to choose to meet.
Further on to the east, I came to Iceland’s equivalent of Wall Street, Borgartún. This is a straight road running parallel to the bay, lined with modern office buildings of glass and red and black stone a few stories high. Vanity Fair describes the style as ‘Asshole Capitalist’, but I think that’s a little harsh. Every capital city needs somewhere to put its banks, and with its views of Mount Esja and Faxaflói Bay and its manageably sized buildings, I suspect this would be a pretty good place to work. And for Magnus to meet a hotshot lawyer.
Reykjavik and the burbs
My Reykjavík researches continued along Laugavegur, which is Reykjavík’s smartest shopping street. Laug means ‘hot spring’, so this was the road from Ingólfur’s original Norse settlement to the geothermal spring, which is now a swimming pool with hot tubs near Borgartún.
It became the route women took to do their washing, and presumably a crowded thoroughfare on Saturday, or laugardagur, when everyone went off for a bath. It’s still a hot place on Saturday night, after my bedtime, since most of the trendy clubs and bars are on this street.
The trendiest of these is Kaffibarinn. This is a small metal town house, painted bright red, a few yards up Bergstadastraeti from Laugavegur. It is easily identifiable by the London Underground sign hung above the door. It has an awesome reputation: the place to go on a weekend night for music and violent dancing. It’s supposed to be or have been part-owned by Damon Albarn of Blur, but it’s hard to pin that factoid down: maybe he had a drink there once. Iceland’s most famous film director, Baltasar Kormákur, met Hallgrímur Helgason at the bar there, and decided to make a film of his book, 101 Reykjavík.
The bar itself is a very pleasant place to go during the day, or an early weekday evening. Warm, cosy, wooden, old, with trendily dressed and laid-back bar staff. By night, things change, as I found out several years later.
I went to dinner at my publisher Pétur’s house one Saturday. I told him and his guests I planned to go to some clubs afterwards for research purposes. Dinner was wonderful, but it dragged on, and we all drank quite a bit. I assumed everyone had forgotten about my plan. Finally, at 2.30 a.m., an author there announced it was time to go to Kaffibarinn.
It was a bewildering experience. The music was loud, the beat insistent — fair enough. The room at the back was heaving with a mass of bodies, mostly Icelandic, all drunk or high, swaying and writhing. It was summer — at 3 a.m. it was dawn or dusk or something — and the dim daylight seemed to give everyone an illicit energy.
Inside elbows and feet were jabbing. Outside, there was much shouting, swearing, baring of stomachs and chests, and vomiting. We left after an hour or so, because one of our group was embarrassed at jostling into her students from the university.
I found it extremely interesting, but it would be wrong to say I enjoyed it. I’m way too old.
But I do like a scruffy pub, and I thought Magnus would like one too. Two Icelanders in London had recommended I try the Grand Rokk, which lurked off Hverfisgata between Laugavegur and the bay. Sadly, this place is no longer open. To get in you went through a white picket gate in a white picket fence past a small outside tent for smokers.
Inside, the bar was wood-panelled, cosy and smelled strongly of spilled beer. A row of steady drinkers lined the bar: two old guys with grey hair and flat caps, a red-faced man with a bushy beard, a chubby American girl with short blonde hair and a chubby Icelandic friend, a Filipina and a shaven-headed Swedish guy in leathers. They all seemed to know each other, and the conversation was general and amiable in a mix of Icelandic and English.
The older guys had shot glasses of spirits to chase their beers. A few feet away from the bar two men were playing chess. A particularly ruddy drinker suddenly started singing ‘In the Summer Time’ from Porgy and Bess in a rich, sensuously slurred baritone. Everyone ignored him.
A good bolthole for Magnus.
Sadly the Grand Rokk went bankrupt and is closed now.
A city isn’t just its centre. I needed to get outside to the suburbs; that is after all where most of the people live and much of the crime is committed. So I spent a couple of days on buses. The Reykjavík bus system isn’t too difficult to figure out, and the drivers are helpful. It’s great for people-watching: it seemed to me that many ordinary Icelanders looked a lot like ordinary Britons, or to be more accurate, ordinary Scots. I was reminded of all that British and Irish DNA in the Icelandic genome.
The centre of Reykjavík has character, the outskirts don’t. The town has grown rapidly in the last fifty years, swallowing up the farms that surrounded it in uniform housing estates. There is an inner ring of housing built in the fifties and sixties, which now has a kind of grey pebbledash East German retro charm. Some of the fancier houses in the suburbs show signs of architectural imagination, but frankly, not many.
Oddly, there are some stunning modern churches, for example at Mjódd and Grafarholt. But the suburbs are also infested with dual carriageways, car dealerships, DIY stores, IKEA, small squat office blocks and billboards.
Some of the developments were under construction, some more had been abandoned half-built. The crash was coming. The only difference between Reykjavík’s dull suburbs and those of its American or European equivalents are the stunning views: of Faxaflói Bay and its islands, of Mount Esja, of the heath and mountains to the south, and of the dramatic black lavascape stretching towards Keflavík to the west.
If there is a tough suburb of Reykjavík, it is Breidholt. This is where rich men say they grew up in rags-to-riches stories, it’s where drug dealers live in novels and where people are interviewed about poverty in magazine articles. It all looked quite pleasant to me. It’s a reminder that high-crime areas in Iceland don’t resemble Baltimore, or Chicago’s South Side, or the Moss Side in Manchester or Harlesden in London. Frankly, the East Anglian town of King’s Lynn is scarier, and King’s Lynn is not very scary.
Breidholt has its gangsta rappers. One of them, Móri, describes life in Reykjavík’s grittiest streets:
‘I’ve been around. I’ve seen the darker side of life. I lived in Breidholt for a while. There is a drug dealer in every house there. There was also a gunfight there last year. But now I live in a nice area with my girlfriend and my pet turtle. I used to have two pet turtles but one of them died after the police raided my house and forgot to feed it. They didn’t even have a warrant.’
At the other end of the social scale is Seltjarnarnes, a neighbourhood just to the north-west of Reykjavík, sitting on a peninsula (a nes) jutting out into the bay. It’s flat and windswept, but there are some wealthy roads here, many of the houses on which were bought by ‘quota kings’, fishermen who made a killing by selling their fishing quotas.
Some of the new breed of entrepreneurs live here too. One of these wealthy streets is named Bakkavör, which is also the name of a large food company now headquartered in London and founded by two Icelandic brothers.
The houses themselves are modern and nicely designed, but not large. They look nowhere near as impressive as similar rich neighbourhoods in other capital cities, but that is in itself impressive. At least to me.
At the tip of Seltjarnarnes is the lighthouse and beach of Grótta. More about that next time.
It became the route women took to do their washing, and presumably a crowded thoroughfare on Saturday, or laugardagur, when everyone went off for a bath. It’s still a hot place on Saturday night, after my bedtime, since most of the trendy clubs and bars are on this street.
The trendiest of these is Kaffibarinn. This is a small metal town house, painted bright red, a few yards up Bergstadastraeti from Laugavegur. It is easily identifiable by the London Underground sign hung above the door. It has an awesome reputation: the place to go on a weekend night for music and violent dancing. It’s supposed to be or have been part-owned by Damon Albarn of Blur, but it’s hard to pin that factoid down: maybe he had a drink there once. Iceland’s most famous film director, Baltasar Kormákur, met Hallgrímur Helgason at the bar there, and decided to make a film of his book, 101 Reykjavík.
The bar itself is a very pleasant place to go during the day, or an early weekday evening. Warm, cosy, wooden, old, with trendily dressed and laid-back bar staff. By night, things change, as I found out several years later.
I went to dinner at my publisher Pétur’s house one Saturday. I told him and his guests I planned to go to some clubs afterwards for research purposes. Dinner was wonderful, but it dragged on, and we all drank quite a bit. I assumed everyone had forgotten about my plan. Finally, at 2.30 a.m., an author there announced it was time to go to Kaffibarinn.
It was a bewildering experience. The music was loud, the beat insistent — fair enough. The room at the back was heaving with a mass of bodies, mostly Icelandic, all drunk or high, swaying and writhing. It was summer — at 3 a.m. it was dawn or dusk or something — and the dim daylight seemed to give everyone an illicit energy.
Inside elbows and feet were jabbing. Outside, there was much shouting, swearing, baring of stomachs and chests, and vomiting. We left after an hour or so, because one of our group was embarrassed at jostling into her students from the university.
I found it extremely interesting, but it would be wrong to say I enjoyed it. I’m way too old.
But I do like a scruffy pub, and I thought Magnus would like one too. Two Icelanders in London had recommended I try the Grand Rokk, which lurked off Hverfisgata between Laugavegur and the bay. Sadly, this place is no longer open. To get in you went through a white picket gate in a white picket fence past a small outside tent for smokers.
Inside, the bar was wood-panelled, cosy and smelled strongly of spilled beer. A row of steady drinkers lined the bar: two old guys with grey hair and flat caps, a red-faced man with a bushy beard, a chubby American girl with short blonde hair and a chubby Icelandic friend, a Filipina and a shaven-headed Swedish guy in leathers. They all seemed to know each other, and the conversation was general and amiable in a mix of Icelandic and English.
The older guys had shot glasses of spirits to chase their beers. A few feet away from the bar two men were playing chess. A particularly ruddy drinker suddenly started singing ‘In the Summer Time’ from Porgy and Bess in a rich, sensuously slurred baritone. Everyone ignored him.
A good bolthole for Magnus.
Sadly the Grand Rokk went bankrupt and is closed now.
A city isn’t just its centre. I needed to get outside to the suburbs; that is after all where most of the people live and much of the crime is committed. So I spent a couple of days on buses. The Reykjavík bus system isn’t too difficult to figure out, and the drivers are helpful. It’s great for people-watching: it seemed to me that many ordinary Icelanders looked a lot like ordinary Britons, or to be more accurate, ordinary Scots. I was reminded of all that British and Irish DNA in the Icelandic genome.
The centre of Reykjavík has character, the outskirts don’t. The town has grown rapidly in the last fifty years, swallowing up the farms that surrounded it in uniform housing estates. There is an inner ring of housing built in the fifties and sixties, which now has a kind of grey pebbledash East German retro charm. Some of the fancier houses in the suburbs show signs of architectural imagination, but frankly, not many.
Oddly, there are some stunning modern churches, for example at Mjódd and Grafarholt. But the suburbs are also infested with dual carriageways, car dealerships, DIY stores, IKEA, small squat office blocks and billboards.
Some of the developments were under construction, some more had been abandoned half-built. The crash was coming. The only difference between Reykjavík’s dull suburbs and those of its American or European equivalents are the stunning views: of Faxaflói Bay and its islands, of Mount Esja, of the heath and mountains to the south, and of the dramatic black lavascape stretching towards Keflavík to the west.
If there is a tough suburb of Reykjavík, it is Breidholt. This is where rich men say they grew up in rags-to-riches stories, it’s where drug dealers live in novels and where people are interviewed about poverty in magazine articles. It all looked quite pleasant to me. It’s a reminder that high-crime areas in Iceland don’t resemble Baltimore, or Chicago’s South Side, or the Moss Side in Manchester or Harlesden in London. Frankly, the East Anglian town of King’s Lynn is scarier, and King’s Lynn is not very scary.
Breidholt has its gangsta rappers. One of them, Móri, describes life in Reykjavík’s grittiest streets:
‘I’ve been around. I’ve seen the darker side of life. I lived in Breidholt for a while. There is a drug dealer in every house there. There was also a gunfight there last year. But now I live in a nice area with my girlfriend and my pet turtle. I used to have two pet turtles but one of them died after the police raided my house and forgot to feed it. They didn’t even have a warrant.’
At the other end of the social scale is Seltjarnarnes, a neighbourhood just to the north-west of Reykjavík, sitting on a peninsula (a nes) jutting out into the bay. It’s flat and windswept, but there are some wealthy roads here, many of the houses on which were bought by ‘quota kings’, fishermen who made a killing by selling their fishing quotas.
Some of the new breed of entrepreneurs live here too. One of these wealthy streets is named Bakkavör, which is also the name of a large food company now headquartered in London and founded by two Icelandic brothers.
The houses themselves are modern and nicely designed, but not large. They look nowhere near as impressive as similar rich neighbourhoods in other capital cities, but that is in itself impressive. At least to me.
At the tip of Seltjarnarnes is the lighthouse and beach of Grótta. More about that next time.
Favourite Places: Mokka Kaffi
Time for another one of my favourite places in Iceland.
Reykjavík has plenty of good cafés, but my favourite is Mokka. It’s a few yards up Skólavördustígur (the Skola Street) on the left, in a building that used to be white but is now raspberry red.
It is supposedly the oldest café in Reykjavík, founded in 1958 by an Icelander returning to Reykjavík from Naples where he had been studying music. The warmth and friendliness of the place hits you as soon as you walk in, subtly conveyed by the smell of coffee mixed with waffles and strawberry jam, the house speciality.
It’s a small café with leather benches, booths and wood-panelled walls under yellow light. These are hung with pictures by Reykjavík artists that rotate monthly: abstracts, photographs, landscapes, all for sale. Often, the artist will be there too, willing to talk about their work.
The staff are young, friendly and of course speak perfect English. I have often suggested Mokka as a place to meet my sources. It has a reputation as a hangout for artists, writers and intellectuals, a sort of Icelandic Deux Magots, with better waffles.
Reykjavík has many good cafés. Grái Kötturinn (‘the Grey Cat’), on Hverfisgata, is just as cosy as Mokka and famous for its large American-style breakfasts. Babalú, further up Skólavördustígur, is like a little bit of Morocco swept in some Saharan storm to a wet rock in the Atlantic. And Reykjavík Roasters is a classic hipster artisanal coffee place complete with mysterious metal equipment and sacks of coffee scattered around.
There are no Starbucks in Reykjavík, but the local chain, Kaffitár, is pretty good: the kind of place where you can linger over a book or a laptop and a cup of coffee.
Reykjavík has plenty of good cafés, but my favourite is Mokka. It’s a few yards up Skólavördustígur (the Skola Street) on the left, in a building that used to be white but is now raspberry red.
It is supposedly the oldest café in Reykjavík, founded in 1958 by an Icelander returning to Reykjavík from Naples where he had been studying music. The warmth and friendliness of the place hits you as soon as you walk in, subtly conveyed by the smell of coffee mixed with waffles and strawberry jam, the house speciality.
It’s a small café with leather benches, booths and wood-panelled walls under yellow light. These are hung with pictures by Reykjavík artists that rotate monthly: abstracts, photographs, landscapes, all for sale. Often, the artist will be there too, willing to talk about their work.
The staff are young, friendly and of course speak perfect English. I have often suggested Mokka as a place to meet my sources. It has a reputation as a hangout for artists, writers and intellectuals, a sort of Icelandic Deux Magots, with better waffles.
Reykjavík has many good cafés. Grái Kötturinn (‘the Grey Cat’), on Hverfisgata, is just as cosy as Mokka and famous for its large American-style breakfasts. Babalú, further up Skólavördustígur, is like a little bit of Morocco swept in some Saharan storm to a wet rock in the Atlantic. And Reykjavík Roasters is a classic hipster artisanal coffee place complete with mysterious metal equipment and sacks of coffee scattered around.
There are no Starbucks in Reykjavík, but the local chain, Kaffitár, is pretty good: the kind of place where you can linger over a book or a laptop and a cup of coffee.
