Photo exhibition: The Local – Copenhagen’s Last Pubs

A unique piece of Danish culture is disappearing – the local pub. At the end of the 1980s there were over 1,000 pubs in Copenhagen. Today just over 200 are left. Two authors and a photographer have visited them all. See some of the most striking Copenhagen pubs and hear about their secrets and oddities in this new exhibition at the Museum of Copenhagen – afterwards you may want to visit some of them yourself.

Enjoying a beer in smoky surroundings has been replaced by a drinking a cortado with oat milk at one of Copenhagen’s new outdoor cafés, and these days the emblems of biker gangs are outnumbered by hipster lumberjack shirts. As urban renewal reaches into every nook and cranny of the city, Copenhagen’s old pubs either disappear or change into something else. But being a regular is still an important part of some Copenhageners’ lives. The local pub also functions as a welfare office, drop-in centre, family and home.

This exhibition presents edited excerpts and photographs from the bestseller book ‘Stamsteder – Københavns sidste værtshuse’ (The Local – Copenhagen’s Last Pubs). The book’s authors Anders Højberg Kamp and Johannes Jacobsen and photographer Thomas Skou visited every old pub in town. The museum has chosen 14 of them from 14 different areas of Copenhagen.

For more information on the exhibition click here.