Copenhagen Metro: M3 "Cityringen"

Ever since I started visiting Denmark in March 2018, there was a lot of building work going on. Well, it's a city, I suppose there always is; but in particular, the city squares Rådhuspladsen and Kongens Nytorv were something like 75% closed off and behind building hoardings. And scattered around the city, 15 more building sites, all preparing the way for something that, for me at least, was rather exciting: the creation of a whole new Metro line, with 15 new stations, and two existing stations extended to provide interchange points.

A month or so before I first visited Copenhagen, I thought one evening "I know, let's find a map of the metro network – familiarise myself with it bit before I get there". And I looked it up, and found it, and thought: is that it?

A very simple metro map: 2 lines in a Y shape. 9 stations are shared between M1 and M2, plus M1 has 6 of its own, and M2 has 7. — Is that it? In 2018: yes. Yes it was.

I'd been working in London for the last ten years, and London's tube network looks like this:

The Transport For London map, showing the tangle of 16 or so lines and 300+ stations which make up the network — The London Underground, Overground, and DLR networks. Wombles optional.

In fact I was part-way through my effort to visit every single one of London's tube stations - all 270 of them - and find the labyrinth in each station. I didn't quite get to complete this before I left the UK to go and live in Denmark, in January 2019; but I have now visited all 270 of London's tube stations, and found / photographed / documented the labyrinth in 267 of them (the other 3 are currently absent).

So anyway, back to Copenhagen: two lines, 22 stations. This network opened in 2002, so it's all very modern, compared to London. The trains are small and driverless, the ride is smooth, the stations are small and efficient, and it just works. Though, I have to say ... they're rather dull. After having toured London's network, I loved seeing the variety of the stations: a huge variety of architecture and character and scale and flow and ... just brilliant, I'm so glad I've visited them all! But Copenhagen's ... well, it just doesn't have the history yet. And of the M1 and M2 line stations, 13 are on the surface, and 9 subterranean. And of those 9, they are uniformly dull, and grey. Sorry, but they are.

So, back that building work: a new metro line, "M3" Cityringen. I moved to live in Copenhagen in January 2019, and throughout the course of the year, gradually the two main building sites, Rådhuspladsen and Kongens Nytorv, became smaller and smaller, as the work neared completion. And finally, on Sunday 29th of September, 2019, the line opened!

Exciting!

With M3 Cityringen the network grew from 22 stations to 37; in 2020 we're expecting part of the M4 line to open, with two more stations (Nordhavn and Orientkaj), with the southern part of M4 coming in (I think) 2024.

I've finally got round to visiting all the new stations – trying every corridor, every stairwell, every escalator, and therefore I now have favourites and opinions and questions.

So, shall we get started?

Frederiksberg Allé

a modern building, at least 4 storeys tall (we can't see the top), next to a pavement. The corner part of the ground floor is 'cut out', the building above supported by columns. There is a glass elevator head here. — The main entrance (escalators and elevator) are on the corner; the side door (under the "M") is for bikes.

A closer look at the entrance area and elevator head

The elevator head, with the label 'Frederiksberg Allé' and the line marker, 'M3'

Heading down into the station, the first thing we notice (compared to the old M1 and M2 lines) is ... colour!

The inside of the station. The two large side walls are covered in rectangular tiles of various shades of green. There is white lighting, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes concealed. — A welcome splash of colour! Frederiksberg Allé's theme: green 💚

Most of Copenhagen's subsurface metro stations follow the same template, with a few variations; and Frederiksberg Allé almost does too. The stations are generally well-lit and spacious, with long lines of sight. This particular station's quirk is the entrance being offset slightly to the side.

One of the interesting things to look for in each station is the roof: some of them have genuine skylights; some of them are built to look a bit like skylights, but they're fake, because there's actually a building on top. Frederiksberg Allé has the latter:

Looking up to the roof. Three square sections, one of which has simple white strip lights, where the other two rise into skew pyramids, composed of tesellating triangular tiles, and concealed uplighting. — Not quite skylights. Pretty, though.

Almost all (or maybe all?) the new stations have lots of space for bikes too. Almost uniformly across Cityringen, the bike area is orange:

The bike area. A plain concrete space, with a long bike rack (wild guess: space for 120 bikes?) along one wall. The two long side walls are orange, as are the grips on the bike racks.

Frederiksberg

Frederiksberg is one of the two stations which provide interchange to the old M1/M2 lines (the other being Kongens Nytorv). So here we can easily see the old and new lines if not quite side by side, then at least very close to each other.

Frederiksberg's paneling is grey, but a much prettier and more interesting kind of grey than the old M1/M2:

Inside the main station well. We can see the various escalators, nicely symmetrically arranged, and we can see right down to the platform level. The two side walls are tiled in a marble-effect grey. — Frederiksberg: I love these big long lines of sight!

Here we see the old and new stations coming together:

A modern and clean station interchange area, maybe 10 metres square. A (genuine) skylight provides natural illumination. A few people are here, going on their way. — M3 to the left; M1/M2 to the right.

There's also an exit directly into Frederiksberg Centrum shopping centre (just like the other interchange, Kongens Nytorv, actually: that has an entrance directly to/from Magasin):

Reverse angle of the previous image, showing the short escalators up to the shopping centre, and the stairs up to the street, and daylight. — Shopping centre to the left; fresh air to the right.

There are also proper skylights here, and the lifts, and an extra exit to the shopping center car park.

Aksel Møllers Have

I rather like the texture of the wall paneling here. I think it's rather lovely:

The station well (i.e. the large cuboid space, with the platform area as its base). The walls here are made of (well, covered with) housebrick-sized red-beige tiles. — Can you tell that I like symmetry?

Looking up the end wall. This viewing angles accentuates the fact that some of the tiles have a diagonal, with different textures each side. — Close-up of the wall, with one of the CCTV cameras.

I also rather like its imperfections:

Other than that we've got the usual sort of set-up: main entrance with elevator; side entrance for bikes, wrapping round the back of the station:

From street level, stood at the top of the stairs, which lead to the back door and bike area. — The back door.

Here's a little detail I noticed here: where many older stations would have had a metal "groove" ramp next to the stairs, to slot your bike in, here it's kind of subtly built-in: a smooth, rounded edge to the stairway, so you can get your bike up and down:

Close-up of the side edge of the stairs, showing the integrated bike ramp, and its curve to blend it to the wall (and therefore avoid 'grabbing' tyres). — Bike-friendly :-)

And we have rather lovely skylights here too:

Looking up to the three skylights. Each is square, with a centre which is also square (but offset 45 degrees) and rises to allow sunlight in. Around the sunlight centres, there are 8 gold-brown triangles, like petals. — Rather flower-like, I think.

Nuuks Plads

Now it has to be said ... not all of these stations are amazingly different from each other. This one felt rather similar to the last:

Side wall view, showing the brick-sized brown tiles. These ones don't have the diagonal two-texture feature of the last station, though. — Brown-ish pattern on the walls. Not unpretty, though.

I love how light these stations can be:

From one of the mezzanine areas, looking up towards the exit. Everything looks light and clean.

Nørrebros Runddel

I quite enjoyed the slight irregularities in the texture of the walls here:

Closeup of one of the side walls, showing that the tiles are in fact bricks, with slightly irregular and rough sizes and edges.

Here there's no proper skylight, so the roof is light, but not open to actual daylight:

The fake skylights, with their uplighting. Actually, these ones are darker than most.

Close-up of part of the roof, where 8 triangular metallic panels meet. Its asymmetrical: some of the points are very acute, some less so. One is almost a right angle. One looks like it might be obtuse. — Close-up of part of the roof. I like geometry.

Nørrebro

At Nørrebro we're back to colour, but more bold than before: red!

The station well, brightly-lit, showing the two side and one end wall, covered in bright uniformly-red panels.

Looking directly up. An interesting mixture of black, white (lighting / sunlight), red, and a kind of gold hue.

Those same colours as in the previos picture, but now we're down on the station platform. Wait, this is the first platform-level picture in this article, isn't it? How did that happen?

Actual daylight, too, so that's nice:

Looking almost directly up to the skylights again. — The roof. Colourful, *and* pretty shapes. Nice!

There's still a bit of building work going on though, to make interchange between the M3 metro and S-tog easier:

Outside, street level, showing the S-train line interchange, with escalators. However, they're not ready for use: the area is a fenced-off building site, with a polite sign saying asking people to take 'a little detour'. — En lille omvej? Intet problem. Tak!

Skjolds Plads

The walls are back to grey again here, but this time with an interesting "wave" texture, as they bow in and out:

An angled view of the side wall, with plain grey rectangular panels. However, some or all of the panels are not mounted flat to the wall, giving a kind of gentle wave effect. — Wibbly wobbly walls.

Looking up along the join between and end wall and a side wall, to accentuate the wiggliness. — Wiggly!

Apart from that, it's kinda the usual: skylights, spacious, back entrance for bikes. Good stuff :-)

Vibenshus Runddel

So it turns out that Vibenshus Runddel has a surprising unique feature: colours. Not just colour, but colours, plural:

Looking up against a side wall. The familar rectangular wall panels here are plain white, but each one is angled such that the top is slightly further in than the bottom, and thus the lower face of each panel is visible — just 2-3 cm or so. These lower faces are various coloured red, green, yellow, and blue. — Pretty!

Here the wall panels tilt back slightly, so that the underside of each panel protrudes slightly, and there's where the colour is. It's rather nice actually!

This station is in the corner of Fælledparken, so here's the main entrance:

And on the surface, the skylights:

Sadly the bike area & entrance here were closed off when I visited.

Poul Henningens Plads

Another new feature on the walls here: an interesting horizontal/vertical rectangular pattern:

Thankfully not Tetris, otherwise the walls would be disappearing by now.

Apart from that it's the usual kind of layout, albeit with a slight kink in the corridor on the way out, if I remember correctly.

Back entrace. There's those nice little bits on the sides for the bikes, again.

Trianglen

Light grey walls here, but they're shiny! What it lacks in colour, it makes up for in light:

This way for bikes. There are motion sensors on the lights, to save energy. Obviously nobody had been in there for a while.

No skylights here, though I'm not sure why, because there's loads of space on the surface, if I remember correctly. Weird.

Østerport

At Østerport we're back to BIG BOLD COLOUR:

It's not really midnight. Or noon. For some reason quite a few of the M3 Cityringen clocks are showing 12 o'clock. Others have the right time. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The exit closest to Østerport main station is currently a rather temporary, rattly, noisy, and bouncy scaffolding staircase. It's actually quite disconcerting:

Hopefully before long they'll build a proper link between the two stations.

Meanwhile, a distraction: What are these? I keep seeing them but I don't know what they are:

Marmorkirken

On to Marmorkirken, which is well as being in perhaps the most spectacular setting of all the stations ...

... is also of a very different structure to all the other stations. I'm guessing they didn't have much space to work in here, squeezing the whole station between the church and Store Kongensgade, not just on the surface, but subsurface too. The result is a station with a very different feel indeed.

The only long sightline here is immediately below the surface, along the bike storage / ticket hall area:

Just below the surface: the ticket hall.

Deeper than that, though, things are rather different from everything else. The escalators, instead of being formatted like this, as they are in most stations:

Most stations here: the "up" and "down" escalators are quite separate, the two train platforms are on the same level, and the station isn't that deep.

are, in Marmorkiren, more like this (excuse the quick sketch):

The "up" and "down" escalators intertwine; one of the platforms is directly *above* the other one; and the whole station goes much deeper.

So the whole station has a very different feel: not so spacious, perhaps even a little claustrophobic.

It's much harder to illustrate the structure of this station, because it's just so hard to see more than a little of it at a time!

The walls have this rather attractive marbled pattern, echoing the church above:

And down at platform level, the platform space is quite narrow, and not backing on to the other platform. This is platform 1, the higher platform; platform 2 is below this.

And right at the bottom, aaaaaaaall the way down, is platform 2:

Right. On we go.

A closeup of one of the statues on top of the church. It's a man who holds some kind of cruciform object in his left hand. His right arm is raised, pointing off at ... something. Or nothing. — "Which way to Kongens Nytorv, mate? Ah, cheers guv!"

Kongens Nytorv

Along with Frederiksberg, Kongens Nytorv is the other interchange point with M1/M2 – the difference here being, because it's so central, this station is built to handle much more traffic. It's big (compared to the rest of the network).

The platform area. There are a few people here. On the left and right, the glass safety walls, and on the left, a train is waiting. The ceiling is high, and includes two large fake skylights. — The M3 platforms at Kongens Nytorv.

Straight away this feels bigger: the station is wider, there's more distance between the two platforms. The (fake) skylights are wider. The placement of the escalators is such that they don't take up as much space:

Similar to the above picture, but the reverse angle. More people, boarding and alighting the train; a whole row of the skylights; three escalators connecting this area to the ticket hall above.

Closeup of the skylight / roof area. Nice triangular geometry with different shades depending on the lighting. — The roof of the M3 at Kongens Nytorv. More geometry. Nice :-)

The corridor at one end of the M3 leads out, down a rather long corridor that doubles back on itself ...

A long, plain, straight, doorless pedestrian tunnel. It is brightly lit. In the distance right at the end stands a person. — I feel like I should be about to try to destroy the Death Star. Pull up, Red 5!

... and then out to Det Kongelige Teater:

Steps up to street level. At the top of the steps we see the decorated theatre, here with a triptych of three golden relief-statues. — Steps up to the theatre. Rather grand, huh?

The other way, if we take the escalators up from the M3, we get to the ticket hall area ...

The underground ticket hall, with people coming and going. There are escalators down to the platform. The wall on the left curves away out of sight, towards the old M1/M2 lines.

... which then leads into the impressively open interchange area:

A large open underground space. Only a handful of people here right now, but this place is obviously built to handle large (for Denmark) passenger volumes. — Off camera to the left: exit to surface. Straight ahead and bear left a bit: M3 (and, in the future, M4). Off camera to the right: M1/M2.

Part of the wall of the interchange area: the signage showing the station name, diagrams of the four lines that pass through here, schematic map, and arrows indicating left for M3/M4, right for M1/M2.

Y'all know I like patterns, textures and geometry by this point:

Familiar triangular patterns in the roof

The main exit, to where Strøget meets Kongens Nytorv:

Stairs and a glass elevator to street level

"I'm both Bruce Wayne, and Batman"

Meanwhile of course the old M1/M2 station is still there, though now with what I think are rebuilt entrances. It took me a while to figure out why there's a step up here, before you go down. I assume it's to stop too much rain flooding down the stairway:

At street level, the stairs down into the back / bike entrance. There is one step *up*, before we then go down. — Mind the step.

Meanwhile the bike area here – you remember I said they're nearly all orange? This is the exception. It features an artwork called "Fra sted til sted" (From place to place), by Pernelle Maegaard:

The corridors around the back / bike area of Kongens Nytorv station. The floor and walls are all painted in bright colours. There is a theme of concentric / nested circles, sometimes connected to each other with thick, bright, straight lines.

The bike area. Bike racks on the side walls. The colourful artwork continues in this area.

I have to say, in contrast to M3, M1/M2 looks very drab:

The M1/M2 area of the station. While well lit, everything is grey, and looks dirty. — 2002, when colours were considered too exciting.

Again we have the exit direct to shopping, this time to Magasin:

The sub-surface interchange level. In the foreground, an escalator descends (towards the M1/M2 lines); a person stands, travelling, looking at their phone. The focal point of the picture is the steps which lead directly up into 'Magasin', a department store. During opening hours, as now, the shop has a flower stall down here.

Last detail from Kongens Nytorv: another artwork. I've seen it before, but never realised it was an artwork:

Information panel describing the art 'Coloured Mirror Balloons'. And yes, they've spelt it the British way.

Grey wall, grey escalators, grey ceiling. But up against the ceiling: a shiny red metallic balloon. — See that balloon? That's art, that is.

Gammel Strand

Alright, only four to go. Gammel Strand: another interesting one, and again, perhaps because of its placement: it's deep, and built below the canal.

On the surface we've got the Fiskerkone statue back at last. Velkommen tilbage, fiskerkone:

The bike entrance is out of action still, so it's down the escalator, or the main steps...

... and into a very long (by Copenhagen Metro standards) escalator, which is, for some reason, lit blue. Perhaps echoing the fact that it's taking us below the waterline.

"Where do those stairs go?" / "They go up."

At the "ticket hall" level, we can stand and admire the engineering, deep below the canal (hence, no proper skylights here):

The curious thing here is ... when the bicycle area opens, is it meant to link in to the main station? I can't see where/how that might happen, if so.

Interesting wall pattern. If you're me, anyway.

Again the station has a rather unusual escalator layout, adding to the space available at the platform level:

Different escalator configuration, compared to most stations. Me, nerdy? Awwwww, you! <blush>

Rådhuspladsen

When I first came to Copenhagen, probably about two-thirds of the city square was shut off, as a building site. Quite the revelation, when in September 2019, it finally opened up, and the square was suddenly bigger! :-)

Rådhuspladsen's colour scheme is a rather bold black, adding more than ever to the idea that this is actually a Death Star, and you should be humming the Imperial March tune:

Big, bold spaces are the order of the day here. And in fact on most of the M3. Maybe the black makes it seem even more so.

Meanwhile at the surface, there's something funny afoot. There are two sets of steps in, as normal (main entrance, and bike entrance), and there are also two elevators ... but one of them is out of action:

Here's the main entrance, with that out-of-action elevator next to it:

and here's a little further down those same steps:

so now I want to know: where does that door on the left go, and where does that elevator go? (Probably to the same place). The door doesn't look like a regular service door – it's too fancy for that, and it doesn't have service-door-type-labelling (you know: code numbers, voltages, warning signs, etc). No, it's just a glass door, locked, and blacked out. What is going on there?

Little detail: at the entrance to every station, there's a door, which I've not yet seen shut (I don't know if it's only shut for emergencies, or maybe it shuts every night. No idea). The silver handrail, when necessary, clicks out of position to allow the door mechanism to shut:

Of course to fit the station in, they had to get space from somewhere, so they made city hall, Rådhuset, smaller. But at least they added an extra tower, so that's nice: