Hauptkirche St. Katharinen

Start at the baroque spire of the Hauptkirche St. Katharinen, then let your eye drop to the massive shaft beneath it. The building joins two very different layers of time. Up to about twenty-three metres, the walls still belong to the first church, documented in 1250. They count as the oldest standing masonry in Hamburg's old town. The church grew up on land newly reclaimed from the water by dykes. Shipbuilders and brewers lived here, later joined by wealthy merchants and many Dutch religious refugees.

For people out on the water, the tower was a familiar landmark. Yet the harbour's closeness brought more than prosperity. Clearing the Brook islands for the free port and the Speicherstadt from 1890 onwards cost the parish more than twenty thousand residents. Air raids gutted the church on the night of 29 July 1943. Builders restored the exterior to the historic plans between 1950 and 1956. Inside, flood marks recall the storm surge of 1962. During renovation, workers uncovered a medieval double portal from the mid-fourteenth century that no surviving plan records.

The church is wheelchair accessible, and its finest act of reconstruction stands within: the great organ. It recreates the instrument Johann Sebastian Bach played in 1720, and its deep Principal stop won his extravagant praise. Flentrop completed the new organ between 2007 and 2013. It brings together sixty-one stops and 4,330 pipes. Among them are 520 historic pipes that survived the war. When the organ sounds, you hear rescued voices from the old instrument inside a new whole.