Stop 3 of 10

Bytaregatan and Klostergatan

A city where lives overlap

Adam and Ulrika walk along Bytaregatan to meet Michael Blomberg. The street is a short transition in the story, but it reveals why Lund works so well as its setting.

The city is compact enough for characters to cross it on foot or by bicycle. Their homes, workplaces, institutions and evening haunts continually overlap; acquaintances, colleagues, witnesses and family members are never entirely separate from one another.

That intimacy creates dramatic pressure. In a large city someone might disappear into distance. Here, every route seems capable of producing another encounter.

Good to know

Extra background — not part of the original printed guide.

Bytaregatan was laid out after the Reformation across the site of the demolished medieval church of Sankt Jakob. On a 1784 map it was simply called Bakgatan—‘the back street.’
The street was still bordered mainly by gardens and open plots in the late eighteenth century. Much of its housing arrived in the 1860s and 1870s for Lund's relatively prosperous residents.
Between roughly 1875 and 1935, Klostergatan changed from a modest artisans' street into a dense commercial corridor of shops, banks and upper-floor apartments.

On to the next stop

Continue east through the centre toward Lundagård. Our next stop is the statue of poet and scholar Esaias Tegnér in the university park.

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