Every design for Esbjerg

Approach Esbjerg from the sea and four towering white figures watch you from Sædding Beach: Man Meets the Sea, the work of Svend Wiig Hansen. Behind them lies a city that did not exist until the state decided to build a harbour here, after Denmark lost its old North Sea ports at Altona and Husum along with the duchies. Before that the area held only a few farms; then a surveyor laid the streets out in a rectangular grid, with Torvet set midway between harbour and station, and the population soared.

Esbjerg Vandtårn, built on a German model a couple of years before the town became a market town, is one of its best-known landmarks. Fiskeri- og Søfartsmuseet, Esbjerg Kunstmuseum and Esbjerg Museum tell the rest: fishing, shipping and farm exports, the ferry to Harwich that ran for well over a century, and now the wind turbines bound for Horns Rev.

If your family came here for the harbour, the fishing boats or the offshore work, this is a town worth wearing: young, laid out on a grid and built facing the sea.