Alexanderplatz

Alexanderplatz is a large square in the Mitte district of central Berlin, east of the River Spree and Museum Island. It began as a cattle market outside the old city gate, and in November 1805 King Frederick William III renamed it in honour of Tsar Alexander I of Russia, who had visited Berlin that October.

By the early 20th century the square was one of the busiest places in the city, a scene captured in Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Heavy bombing in the Second World War destroyed much of the area, and in the 1960s East Germany rebuilt it as a wide pedestrian square framed by modernist buildings. On 4 November 1989 hundreds of thousands of people gathered here in the largest demonstration in East German history that was not organised by the state, five days before the Berlin Wall opened.

The best-known landmark on the square is the Urania World Clock, set up in 1969, which shows the time in cities around the globe and is a common meeting point. Nearby is the Fountain of Friendship, made by Walter Womacka and his team from copper, glass, ceramic and enamel and inaugurated in 1970. The square is overlooked by the Park Inn hotel tower and the Haus des Lehrers with its wide mosaic band, and the 368-metre Fernsehturm, completed in 1969, rises just to the west.

Alexanderplatz station is served by U-Bahn lines U2, U5 and U8, several S-Bahn lines, regional trains, trams and buses, making it one of Berlin's main interchanges. Department stores and shopping centres surround the square, and seasonal markets are held here around Christmas and Easter.

The square is public and free to visit at any time. Allow about half an hour to look around, or combine it with the TV Tower, the Nikolai Quarter and Museum Island, all within walking distance.

What has changed on the square since reunification?

Alexanderplatz covers about 34,000 square metres and is still being reshaped. Trams returned to the square in 1998 after decades of pedestrian-only use, and the Alexa shopping centre, with 56,200 square metres of retail space, opened on the south-east side in September 2007.

In 1993 the architect Hans Kollhoff won the competition for a new masterplan, which the Berlin Senate endorsed in June 1994. It proposed a horseshoe of seven to eight storey blocks and towers of 150 metres. A revised plan in 2015 kept the Haus des Reisens, an East German office block from the 1960s and 1970s, and still allowed up to eleven large new buildings, though the high-rise plans remain disputed.

Some older buildings survived the war and the rebuilding. The listed Alexanderhaus and Berolinahaus on the south-west edge date from the early 1930s, and the Alexanderhaus was renovated by Landesbank Berlin in 1995. The Park Inn tower, built as the Interhotel Stadt Berlin, is 125 metres tall and received a new facade in 2005. The former Centrum Warenhaus became Galeria Kaufhof after a refit between 2004 and 2006 by Josef Paul Kleihues. The square's old mascot, a 7.5 metre copper statue of Berolina by Emil Hundrieser from 1895, was removed in 1944.