Autumn in London tends to be one of the quieter times of the year. You’re never quite sure what to wear – it starts to get a tad too cold to dine al fresco and the high of the summer’s events definitely start to wear off.
Funnily enough, Autumn is also one of the prettiest times in London as the city gets ready for the holidays, Christmas parties and long winter nights.
To brighten up Autumn in London – Hamburg is coming to London!
As it turns out, Hamburg is quite the city to be in, especially if you’re into music festivals. The best part of a festival in the city is that you can eat your cake and have it – party all weekend but still get to go home to your bed at 5am, have hot showers, explore the city (if you’re visiting) and get ready to do it all again the following night!
Hamburg is also a pretty city so there’s tons to see and do in the city during the day too! (We visited last year for the Christmas markets so we know this fact only too well – see here and here).
Right! So back to my original point – Hamburg is coming to London! Hamburg On Tour – is bringing the party right to our doorsteps in London this October. On the 20th and 21st of October, there’s going to be a party in Brick Lane hosted by Hamburg and you’re invited!
The Location: The Boiler House, 152 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. The nearest stations are Aldgate East and Shoreditch though you could also use Whitechapel and Liverpool Street. Time is from 12noon till 11pm so you can pop in whenever is most convenient for you!
Rather than rehash them here – the full details are available on the Hamburg On Tour website here (the final line-up will be confirmed later on so keep an eye out on their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram).
Long story short – there’s a free party in London and you’re invited so come along and bring your friends with you! 😉
As official blogger ambassadors of the Hamburg (a new development and one we’re very proud about – #HumbleBrag 😀 ), we got to visit Hamburg a week or so ago to check out the festival scene for ourselves… you know, for research. 😉
As I mentioned previously, we’d had an amazing time in Hamburg when we visited in winter and as soon as we arrived at the hotel in Hamburg (following a 1 hour flight from London on Eurowings), we wasted no time in heading to explore the city.
But, first thing first – lunch!
On this visit to the city, we went on something of a more local tour of the city – skipping the shinier sights of the city in search of where Hamburgers (that’s what people from Hamburg are called right? 😉 ) hang out – it was Friday evening after all.
Sternschanze was, by and large, the recommendation for where to go out in. This once run down neighbourhood of Hamburg is now one of the best places to visit for food, drinks and a good night out in town.
As our night was already planned, we would be attending the MS Dockville Festival with our friend Vicky, we decided to stick to food and drinks here.
Recommendations on where to visit are Bullerei – great for food and drinks…
…and Braugasthaus Altes Mädchen – a brewery house which has great food too (though look out for the breads here – it’s something of a speciality)!
Also, pop by Ratsherrn Brauerei – a local brewery, to pick up some drinks for when you’re getting ready back at the hotel.
We spent the rest of the evening wandering around the area, stopping to take in all the street art, retro stores and find out about some secret music venues (turns out – this city has long since had musical roots, even the Beatles had roots here for a little while before they became world famous).
All this sightseeing malarkey is hungry work 😉 so we popped into Harbor Cake for some coffee – we’d just arrived from China so the jetlag was real by this point in the evening but nothing a nice cuppa coffee couldn’t sort out.
We also stopped for what was meant to be one cake but ended up being a sampling of 6 different cakes!
And don’t be fooled by that word ‘sampling’ the cake sizes here are as huge as they are delicious! Wasn’t sure about the poppy seeds on – the one with the dark bits in the middle – but even that turned out to be quite an unexpectedly delightful surprise. The cheesecake for me was, by and large, the winner though Lloyd’s fave was definitely the chocolate cake.
Caffeinated and totally caked-up, we hit the streets of Hamburg again…
…though it didn’t take too long before our thoughts turned to food again and with that, on a recommendation by the locals we’d met, we headed off to Hatari The Corner for dinner.
In Hatari, the burgers and salads are humongous and the steak (which is what I opted for) was absolutely cooked to perfection. I love it when people get a steak right so, armed with a beer from Ratsherrn Brewery (which we visited earlier), I was very much in my happy place!
Now, I’ve got to let you in on a little secret here – well, it’s not as much a secret but it’s something that sounds odd, especially when you come from the UK – the home of summer festivals. I’ve never been to a proper festival before.
British festivals usually involve lots of camping, sometimes in the rain (which also equates to mud), willies to deal with said rain and mud, shared bathrooms and lots of portaloos (which till this day, I genuinely struggle with). I like having a nice bed to roll into after a busy day and so the idea of going a proper festival was totally lost on me.
This was the case until recently when I started paying more attention to festivals in the UK (on TV) and finally when a group of friends visited for the first time and absolutely loved it.
“Yes, there’s the whole hassle that comes with not having your own clean living space but it’s temporary and so worth it!” they reassured me and so with that, I’ve always been intrigued about attending a festival.
Dockville festival was the perfect way to do it. You got that true festival spirit – right down to mud as it started raining while we were having dinner but we also didn’t get thrown too far into the deep end and could head back home later that night (I think we ended up going to bed around 4 or 5am) and could do it all over again!
There are a fair few stages here but we were far too keen to just stick to one place! We got ourselves some drinks and decided to hop around from stall to stall to try out all the drinks (okay, fine – not all but a fair few) and a bit of the food (though I have to admit, this was just the greed speaking now cos we’d eaten quite a lot by this point).
As a true festival rookie, I didn’t show up in festival appropriate footwear (I was there with a pair of perforated driver shoes) and so before long, there was mud in my shoes. I don’t know if it was the music, the brilliant company, the drunks or just the fun atmosphere but it was just so easy to ignore the muddy shoes and just go ahead and have a great old time!
Vicky even managed to blag us entry into the VIP tent for a brewery (right next to the one for Chanel – though at a festival, guess which one was more popular… *Hint – it’s the one with the bottomless refills of beers) where we watched the main act, Flume, perform from our vantage view point.
The night ended in eating huge slices of pizza, lots of laughing all the way to our hotel and us totally understanding why a visit to Hamburg during festival season is an absolute summer must-do!
Now, let’s do this all again in London in 20th and 21st of October, shall we? 😉
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