Kamppi – Helsinki’s 4th quarter

By Heta Ängeslevä

KAMPPI is the new commercial heart of Helsinki marked by a shopping complex and a busy transit hub. Up to 200,000 people pass through Kamppi each day. But Kamppi is a great deal more. Originally known as the “fourth quarter of Helsinki”, the area has a colourful past.

“Kamppi was included in the Helsinki city plan in the 1830’s – two decades after Helsinki became Finland’s capital – but the area was used as early as the 17th century. The field was used by young men as a sporting ground and later for army drills,” explains Martti Helminen, a special researcher at Helsinki City Archives.

As Helsinki grew, Kamppi long remained undeveloped. Army horses still grazed there in the 1930’s. The Tennispalatsi (tennis palace) commercial and sports building was completed in the late 1930’s, but the war years postponed further development by decades.

THE NARINKKA square, built in the centre of Kamppi in 2005, is named after a market operating in the area from 1876 to 1929.

“Jewish vendors would sell used clothing there,” Helminen says.
Other details of Kamppi’s past include a gas silo and a red-brick fire station, which were both demolished in the 1960’s.

The site of the Narinkka Square has hosted a garrison built in the 1830’s and a drilling field for the Russian army. The main building, located at the site of today’s Lasipalatsi, was destroyed during the Finnish Civil War in 1918, but an auxiliary building survived, to serve as a bus terminal from 1935 to 2005. Today that building houses Laituri, the Helsinki City Planning Department’s information and exhibition space.

LAITURI’s autumn exhibition presents Kamppi’s past, buildings and events, as well as envisioning the area’s future including the New Amos Anderson Museum to be built in and around Lasipalatsi.

Kamppi exhibition at Laituri 18 September–31 December 2015.
Narinkka 2, Helsinki.
Find out more at http://laituri.hel.fi/.

Translated by Johanna Lemola

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