Hamburg Wallring
The Wallring is a semi-circular set of roads and parks that surrounds Hamburg’s inner city. It is a four-lane ring road about 3.3 kilometers long, with continuous buildings on its inner side. On the outside runs a string of parks for most of its length. The Wallring follows the outline of Hamburg’s old city wall, the Wallanlagen, which was torn down in the first half of the 19th century.
The wall and the ring were built where Hamburg’s fortifications stood from the 1620s until the 1840s. The gates along the walls—Millerntor and Dammtor on the western side, Steintor on the eastern side, and Sandtor and Brooktor near the Elbe, with later additions Hafentor, Holstentor, Klostertor and Deichtor—are still remembered in the city as place names.
In the early 19th century the ramparts lost their military use. Napoleon’s 1806 capture of Hamburg sped up their removal, which happened between 1820 and 1837. The outer glacis was turned into a park, designed by Isaak Altmann. In the 1860s the Wallring was developed as a boulevard, with notable buildings along the inner side—such as the Kunsthalle (1869), the Oberpostdirektion (1887) and the Natural History Museum (1891). The outer side remained mostly open, with only a few structures among the parks. The circular park faced early setbacks from the building of the Hamburg-Altona rail in the 1840s, and Hamburg Hauptbahnhof was built between 1898 and 1906. The Hamburg Museum opened in 1922 on Holstenwall. The Natural History Museum was destroyed in 1943 during World War II. After the war, many ditches were filled with rubble, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s the Esplanade lost much of its northern building ensemble. Since the 1960s the western parks have echoed the design of the International Garden Exhibitions of 1963 and 1973. Parts of the eastern Wallring are tunneled by the Wallringtunnel, built between 1963 and 1966.
The Wallring is split into the Western Wallring and the Eastern Wallring, separated by Lombard Bridge. The bridge marks the border between Neustadt and Altstadt and connects the park areas along the two sides. The Wallring begins at Stintfang on the Elbe and, traffic-wise, at Millerntordamm near Millerntorplatz. Holstenwall, the first section, runs up to Johannes-Brahms-Platz (near the Laeiszhalle) and is flanked by the Große Wallanlagen. After Johannes-Brahms-Platz the route becomes Gorch-Fock-Wall up to Stephansplatz, with the Kleine Wallanlagen and the Old Botanical Garden nearby. The Esplanade is a short but wide stretch from Stephansplatz to the Binnenalster’s northwestern corner; it was built 1827–1830 with neoclassical façades and four rows of linden trees, inspired by London’s Portland Place and Berlin’s Unter den Linden. The Colonnaden shopping street ends here and leads to Jungfernstieg.
Lombardsbrücke crosses the Alster at the site of the former Alster glacis; the current Renaissance Revival bridge (1864–1868) was designed by Johann Hermann Maack and sits on two landscaped feeders. The eastern Wallring is part of Hamburg’s Museum Mile, hosting major art museums, though the outer edge lacks a single, unifying concept and has been redeveloped over time. Since the 1960s most traffic on this side uses the Wallringtunnel. The outer edge also hosts the Kunsthalle (1869) and Galerie der Gegenwart (1997) on Glockengießerwall, while Steintorwall brings the route past Hamburg Hauptbahnhof and the shopping streets Spitalerstraße and Mönckebergstraße on the inner side. Klosterwall ends at Zollkanal. Both the eastern and western sides are lined with landmarks, museums and cultural institutions, making the Wallring a key link between Hamburg’s green spaces along the Elbe and Alster and the city’s urban core.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:22 (CET).