The Birches of Birkelunden

A cavalry officer named Thorvald Meyer laid out this park in the 1860s as he subdivided the farmland around it into what became Grunerlokka, one of Oslo's first planned working-class districts, and lined its edges with birch trees, the species that gave the park its name, bjork being Norwegian for birch. Meyer gave the park to the city for free in 1882, and between 1916 and 1920 much of its internal planting was rearranged into a practical playground for the neighbourhood's children, though the perimeter birches from Meyer's original layout mostly stayed in place. In 2006, Birkelunden and the streets and apartment blocks around it became the first protected urban cultural environment in Norway, a designation covering 116 hectares, 139 buildings, the neighbourhood's Paulus Church and its school, with the park's own birch trees, now around 160 years old, standing at the centre of what the protection order is meant to preserve. Grunerlokka has since become one of Oslo's most fashionable neighbourhoods, its industrial-era apartment blocks converted into some of the city's most sought-after addresses, but the birches ringing the square are the one feature that connects today's cafes and boutiques back to Meyer's 1860s farmland subdivision without needing a plaque to explain it.