City Walk: People and factories in the West End of Aalborg

Join us for an all-new initiative: Aalborg Historical Museum, in close collaboration with Kunsthal Spritten, is launching special guided city walk sin the Aalborg Vestby district focusing on the area’s old factories and the many workers who shaped it. The walk begins at Aalborg Historical Museum and ends inside one of Aalborg’s old and best-known factories: Spritten.

We begin in the former industrial area in the city centre, previously home to smaller factories, and gradually make our way out towards the newer factories and workers’ neighbourhoods in the Vestbyen district. Along the way we pass C. W. Obel’s Tobacco Factory, one of the city’s largest workplaces in the twentieth century. It was originally located in the city centre at what is now C. W. Obels Plads, but it later relocated at Strandvejen, which is where we find it today.

The second part of the walk takes place at the site where Spritten once stood, taking us to another of the city’s most renowned factories. Here, the guides tell the story of the distillery, and you can hear more about the future plans for Kunsthal Spritten as part of the overall development of the Spritten industrial area. Highlights will include the two former boiler halls that will form the setting of the future arts venue and serve as the starting point for the forthcoming, monumental artwork Cloud City by world-renowned Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno.

The distillery closed in 2015. Today, the complex is Denmark’s largest protected industrial heritage site. It is described as one of the twenty-five irreplaceable industrial monuments in this country, and this walk is one of the last chances to see the area before its transformation into a new cultural district begins and, for a while, turns the area into a construction site.

Length: approx. 2 km

Duration: 1.5 hours

Meeting point: Aalborg Historical Museum, 

Algade 48, 9000 Aalborg DK

We will conclude the walk inside the future Kunsthal Spritten with an introduction to the plans for the site.