Welcome to Old Stavanger

Hi there!

As an inhabitant of Old Stavanger, I'd like to welcome you to our neighborhood and to this blog.

The Old Stavanger blog is intended to be a place for me to jot down notes and thoughts concerning the place where I live and have spent a significant amount of my life. If you happen to find it amusing or helpful, so much the better.

If you have no idea what Old Stavanger is, here is a short introduction to get you up to speed:

Old Stavanger or "Gamle Stavanger" in Norwegian, is an area of the city of Stavanger in the county of Rogaland, Norway.

In the years after World War II, a new city plan was created for Stavanger. It included razing most of the old wooden buildings in the city center, and replacing it with new modern structures in concrete. One single voice spoke up against this plan, and today it is recognized that Gamle Stavanger owes its existence to Einar Hedén, then City Architect of Stavanger. In 1956 the city council voted to conserve part of the old city centre.

The area selected for conservation was the one considered the least desirable, consisting of small rundown wooden buildings located on the western side of Vågen, the bay that the center of Stavanger circles. This area has what is considered North Europe’s best kept wood houses, from both the 19th and 20th century. Some of the houses are owned by the municipality, but most are privately owned. Over the years the area has changed from seedy to trendy, and today is considered a choice location for the urban-minded with a sense of history.

So Old Stavanger is not a museum, it is a living community with a couple of hundred households. We who live here are proud of our homes and our neighborhood, and enjoy showing it off to visitors.

Einar Hedén passed away a few years ago, and the central square of Old Stavanger has been renamed from Stavangerplassen to Einar Hedéns Plass, in his memory.

(Parts of the above have been copied from/paraphrased from the Wikipedia entry for Old Stavanger, which is in part written by me.)

I'm going to take a few days now to plan how this blog is going to evolve and what I'm going to write about. If you have any wishes or suggestion, feel free to make a comment.