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Bild: Stadskvarteren på Skansen
Foto: Marie Andersson
Foto: Marie Andersson

The Town Quarter


The Town Quarter of Skansen show what a Swedish town looked like in the mid-19th century. Most of the houses in the Town Quarters come from Stockholm.
Here you will find workshops and dwellings side by side, with a historical interpreter of different crafts and occupations represented.





Attractions include a bakery, an old shop, a potter's workshop, a printer's and a pharmacy, as well as a furniture factory and an engineering workshop —two small industrial undertakings of the 20th century.

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Bild: The allotment huts. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Allotment Huts

The two huts come from the allotments at Tanto in Stockholm and date from about 1920. Initially people mostly grew potatoes and other vegetables but they later bagan to cultivate flowers and plants such as aconites, foxgloves, dog roses, rhubarb, beetroot and broad beans.
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Bild: Bagaren Ken Eklund. Foto: Marie Andersson

The Bakery

The bakery is in a building from Södermalm in Stockholm and shows a bakery from the 1870´s. Behind the shop is a room where the flour was sifted and the newly baked bread was placed to cool. Freshly baked bread can be bought at the bakery.
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Bild: Charles Tottie´s Residence. Photo: Marie Andersson

Charles Tottie's Residence

The Tottie residence is named after its builder Charles Tottie who was one of Sweden´s richest merchants in the 18th century. The large stone dwelling was built at the beginning of the 1770s on his property at the eastern end of Södermalm in Stockholm, then a country district.
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Bild: The Co-op shop. Foto: Marie Andersson

The Co-op at Skansen

The second shop by the ironmonger’s is a co-op shop (known as Konsum in Sweden) from the thirties – a dairy and bakery. Besides milk, cream, yoghurt, bread, cakes and pastries such a shop would also have sold butter and margarine, beer, soft drinks and sweets.
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Bild: The Corn-chandler´s Summerhouse. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Corn-chandler's Summerhouse

The Corn-chandler's Summerhouse from Stockholm was built in the middle of the 18th century by a corn-chandler called Jonas Öman. Summerhouses made it possible to extend and enjoy the short and capricious Swedish summer and they afforded a degree of privacy, especially in the towns.
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Bild: Lunchtime at the Engineering Works. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Engineering Works

This type of factory premises was developed in England and introduced into Sweden during the 1830s. It produced compression-ignition engines among it´s wares.
The premises consists of a row of workshops, a larger machine hall and an office building, all of them built of brisch.
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Bild: The Engraver´s Workshop. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Engraver's Workshop

The Engraver's Workshop is situated opposite the workman’s home and is fitted out like similar premises at the end of the 19th century. The tools and equipment come from various engravers in Stockholm.
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Bild: The Furniture Factory. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Furniture Factory

The Furniture Factory comes from Virserum in Småland and contains machines and other equipment from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many furniture factories in Småland produced heavy furniture in solid oak. During the 1920s birch and elm were also used. The furniture was richly decorated and was of a very high quality.
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Bild: The Goldsmith´s. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Goldsmith's

The Goldsmith's is located in a two-storey building from Stockholm. Gustaf Möllenborg's Goldsmith's workshop from the 1840s was one of the most famous of the day in the 19th century.
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Bild: Gubbhyllan 100

Gubbhyllan

Gubbhyllan lies at the foot of the Skansen escalator. It was built in 1816 and served principally as a summer residence until 1852 when it was acquired by a pastry cook called Wilhelm Davidson. He opened a Swiss café selling cakes and apertifs. The bar on the ground floor now appears as it did in 1889.
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Bild: The Hazelius Mansion. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Hazelius Mansion

The Hazelius Mansion is the birthplace of Artur Hazelius who founded the Nordiska Museet and Skansen. The furnishing ideals introduced from the Continent by King Carl Johan are much in evidence in the magnificent, boldly coloured curtains and the polished furniture with its uncluttered lines.
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Bild: The Ironmonger. Foto: Marie Andersson

The Ironmonger's House

The Ironmonger's House is a typical 19th century wooden building in Swedish towns. The fittings in the ironmonger's date originally from the 1880s though the interior was partially modernized in the 1930s. The building houses has two shops and a small apartment. The goods on display are typical of the three main groups of customers: farmers, builders and householders.
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Bild: Jakobsberg. Photo: Marie Andersson

Jakobsberg

Jakobsberg is the name of an estate that was situated at Hornstull in Stockholm. The current building dates from the end of the 17th century. With its characteristic mansard roof, and its colour scheme it is highly typical of the houses favoured by the aristocracy at that time.
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Bild: Swedenborg’s Summerhouse. Photo: Liv Ravnböl

Swedenborg's Summerhouse

Swedenborg’s Summerhouse comes from the estate in Stockholm that the famous philosopher and scientist Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) purchased and lived in from 1743. Swedenborg created splendid gardens on his estate with summerhouses and pavilions.
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Bild: The Old Savings Bank. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Old Savings Bank

The Old Savings Bank is housed in a building from Södermalm in Stockholm. The building dates from about 1700. The interior shows what a bank looked like in the 1840s when the savings banks movement had been operating in Sweden for a couple of decades.
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Bild: The Old Shop. Photo: Liv Ravnböl

The Old Shop

The shop is fitted out like a small grocery shop in the city aout the year 1840. The shop sold spices, flour, grain, salt, sweets, tobacco, paint, brushes and much else. The goods were kept in drawers or in shelves. Sugar-loaves hung from the ceiling, together with carding brushes and sponges.
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Bild: The Pharmacy. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Pharmacy

date from the latter half of the 18th century and is housed in the same wing of the building as Petissan but to the left of the hall. There is a sign outside in the form of a royal crown to accord with the pharmacy´s name The Crown. The shop fittings are mostly from the palace pharmacy at Drottningholm outside Stockholm as well as from a pharmacy in Köping that was run by the noted chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele.
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Bild: The Post Office. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Post Office

The Post Office is from Virserum in Småland. It is furnished in the style of the 1910s and has a middle-class feeling. On the left on the ground floor is the post office which consists of a lobby and the actual office. Behind these are the family quarters.
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Bild: Keramiker. Foto: Marie Andersson

The Pottery

The Pottery dates from the beginning of the 19th century. It produces both modern wares and traditional Swedish ceramic products. Using a wheel, the potter forms skittles, pots and dishes from clay. These are the dried, decorated, glazed and fired at a high temperature, and in the end they are also for sale in the pottery.


Bild: The Printer´s. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Printer's

The Printer's or, in Latin, Officina Typographica, is housed in a building from 1725 in Stockholm. At the printer's one can see how books were printed as late as the first part of the 19th century.
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Bild: The Saddler´s Workshop. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Saddler's Workshop

The Saddler’s Workshop is on the upper floor at the far end of the yard wing and is equiped with leather-working tools from the end of the 19th century. Typical of the craft are the crescent-shaped knives used for cutting leather.
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Bild: The Tinsmith's. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Tinsmith’s Workshop

The Tinsmith’s Workshop is at the far end of Petissan’s yard. It was built at Skansen to illustrate a smallish tinsmithy from about 1900. Smiths often made work in copper, such as a church spire or household articles such as cans, buckets, lamps and files which required special skills.
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Bild: Gubbhyllan 1905

The Tobacco & Match Museum

The Tobacco & Match Museum is a museum of industrial and cultural history with extensive collections detailing the history of Swedish tobacco and matches.
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Bild: The Vicar´s Summerhouse. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Vicar's Summerhouse

On the Printer's yard there is a summerhouse which used to be situated in the vicar's garden of the Katarina parish in Stockholm. On the roof is a weather vane giving the date of construction as 1734. The yard is also planted with flowers that were typical of a small city garden in the middle of the 19th century.
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Bild: The Workman´s Home. Photo: Marie Andersson

The Workman's Home

The Workman's Home on the first floor with acces from the yard shows how a factoryworker's family lived at the end of the 19th century. Ten people might eat and sleep in a room such as this. Besides the family and perhaps some relations it was usual to have a lodger to help pay the rent.
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Stiftelsen Skansen
Box 27807 ·  115 93 Stockholm ·  08-442 80 00 ·  www.skansen.se