Ian Farrell dives into Berlin’s nineteenth-century Markthallen…

The year is 1883. The newly founded nation of Germany is developing at a rapid rate, with the capital city of Berlin as its political and economic centre.

On the international stage, the country is making a lot of noise establishing itself as a major player in world politics as well as science and other realms. At home, much is also changing: major towns and cities are undergoing rapid industrialisation and modernisation, and none more so than the capital.

Berlin’s population is booming, with new Mietskaserne apartment blocks springing up in the thousands to integrate and accommodate the burgeoning working classes, who are helping create and found the city’s new neighbourhoods: Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg…

Everything seems to be on the rise—standards of living, education, hygiene—and there is a concerted effort to improve the infrastructure for the city’s ever-expanding workforce. A key part of this drive is focussed on restructuring the citizens’ supply of food and goods.

The old markets at which most of the population still buy their groceries are now deemed too unhygienic and difficult to control; a breeding ground for crime and disease. As a result, the Berlin Magistrate commissions town planner Hermann Blankenstein and architect August Lindemann to design and build fourteen grandiose new market halls, which would move all trade indoors where standards of hygiene could be more rigorously maintained.

The new Markthallen were placed strategically around Mitte and residential areas such as Kreuzberg, Wedding and Moabit, and were designed to provide customers with a greater variety of goods close to home in a safer, cleaner shopping environment. Each one even had its own police station to keep crime rates down. They were to herald the dawn of a new commercial age for Berlin’s inhabitants, one that would help define the city’s economic landscape for the twentieth century.

So where are they now? The twentieth century has been and gone, and the commercial identity of Berlin is clearly very different to what Herr Blankenstein had in mind. Obviously, much of this could not have possibly been predicted at the time—the mass destruction caused by two world wars, the boom in technology, the rise of online shopping. But nevertheless, surely something should still remain of such a grand scheme?

The truth is, despite the fanfare that accompanied the opening of the first four Markthallen in 1886 and their ten siblings over the course of the next six years, the scheme was never a complete success. Although outdoor trading had been made illegal in the city itself, many Berliners travelled just beyond the boundary to sites such as the Maybachufer, where they could still enjoy the lower prices and more communal atmosphere of the old markets.

At the other end of the scale, the first big department stores, such as Karstadt and Galeria, were springing up around the country, offering bulk-bought goods …