Now & Then: Carriages, Taxis, Busses And Burgers

Hlemmur’s trip from the periphery to the centre

Until last year, Hlemmur Square, where Laugavegur meets Rauðarárstígur, served as the major public transport hub for Reykjavík, with a purpose-built building to host commuters since 1978. The square became somewhat notorious early on, as some of Reykjavík’s shadier characters would frequent the building. In the early 1980s, the city’s punks, as featured in Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s now legendary 1982 music documentary Rokk í Reykjavík, followed. These shadier characters, living on the edges of society, were then featured in a 2002 documentary titled Hlemmur in Icelandic, but Last Stop for international audiences, which covered the regulars at Hlemmur and their lives with a soundtrack by Sigur Rós. A recommended watch.

Prior to the building pictured being raised there, the plot had a BP gas station and a taxi station, and even earlier in the history of Reykjavík, when the square more or less marked the outskirts of the city, the women of Reykjavík passed by on their long walk up Laugavegur towards the hot spring in Laugardalur to wash their family’s clothes. On their way, they had to cross Rauðará, a stream which ran roughly where Rauðarárstígur street is now, and did so by way of a tiny bridge called the “Hlemmur,” hence the name of the square. In that era, the square was also home to a watering hole for horses.

Old pictures actually show horse-drawn carriages in the square at the beginning of the 20th century, which is more of a novelty to Iceland than most people would think. The wheel, and thus the carriage, were hardly ever used in Iceland until the 20th century because of an absolute lack of roads until that century, meaning that Iceland almost completely skipped the horse-drawn carriage era and went straight from foot or horseback to cars. Perhaps similar to how some places went from no communication to mobile phone networks, skipping the whole landline era.

In 2017, the pictured building was refurbished and repurposed as a food hall, though the square continued to operate as a public transportation hub up until last year when — perhaps in light of the ongoing gentrification in and around the square — the public transportation hub was moved elsewhere. In that sense, Hlemmur has slowly moved from the periphery, to the centre. Where once you’d buy a soggy hot dog and a bus ticket for pocket change, you’ll now be forced to shake out a week’s salary for an artisanal hamburger.