The Esplanade

Esplanadi — the Esplanade, locally just Espa — is the lime-tree park that runs from the centre of Helsinki down to the harbour, laid out as part of Carl Ludvig Engel's plan for the new capital with a street on either side: Pohjoisesplanadi to the north, Eteläesplanadi to the south.

It is where the city goes to be looked at, and it has been since the 1830s. In summer there is a free concert most days at the bandstand; at the end of April it is the centre of the student May Day celebrations.

Walking down it

The park is a few hundred metres long and the interest is concentrated at the two ends.

  • Kappeli, at the harbour end — a glass-and-iron restaurant pavilion, and the one building most associated with the park. It was built in 1867, to a design by Hampus Dahlström, and it is still a restaurant. Older accounts give 1837, which is thirty years early.
  • Espan lava, the Espa Stage, opposite Kappeli — a bandstand with a proper season rather than an ornament. Free concerts run from early May to the end of August, most days, and it is the reason the park fills up on a summer evening.
  • The Runeberg statue, in the middle — Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877), the national poet, by his son Walter Runeberg. It was unveiled in 1885 and it was Helsinki's first public monument, which is the fact worth knowing about it.
  • The Jansson pools, beside the stage — sculpture and water by Viktor Jansson, who is better known now as Tove Jansson's father.
  • Four old kiosks stand near the Runeberg statue: two wooden ones from the 1890s and 1900s and a functionalist one by Gunnar Taucher from 1928. They are still in use.
  • There are also memorials to the writers Zacharias Topelius and Eino Leino.

Havis Amanda is not in the park

Older accounts place her here, and she is not: Ville Vallgren's bronze fountain stands at the far end, on the Market Square itself, where the Esplanade meets the harbour. She is dealt with on the Kauppatori page along with the May Day capping, which is the one day a year the whole Esplanade is given over to a single event.

The two sides

Pohjoisesplanadi and Eteläesplanadi were not interchangeable. The custom in the nineteenth century was that the city's two language communities promenaded on different sides of the park, and the division was a real social fact rather than a quaint one — Helsinki was then a Swedish-speaking city acquiring a Finnish-speaking majority, and the argument about which language the country would run on was conducted partly by where people chose to walk. Older accounts mention the two promenades without saying what separated them, which removes the only interesting thing about it.

The shops

Pohjoisesplanadi and the streets off it are the traditional luxury end of Helsinki, with the Finnish design firms whose names people arrive knowing — glass, ceramics, textiles — along the north side and around the corner on Mannerheimintie.

Stockmann, at the top end, is the department store. Two things in older accounts need correcting: the name takes two ns, and it is the largest department store in the Nordic countries, not in Scandinavia — Finland is not Scandinavian, so the usual phrasing is wrong twice over. Its clock is the standard meeting place in central Helsinki.

For a broader spread of Finnish design than the Esplanade's own shops, the Design District covers Punavuori, Kaartinkaupunki, Kamppi and Ullanlinna just to the south and west, and now runs to well over a hundred shops, studios and workshops.

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