Reykjavík Without a Car

From the church it's a bit over a kilometre downhill into the old town, fifteen or twenty minutes on foot as the streets narrow and tilt toward the water, and the walk sets you down at the oldest thing in Reykjavík. Beneath a building on Aðalstræti, below street level, is the Settlement Exhibition, Reykjavík 871±2: the in-situ ruins of a Viking-age turf-walled longhouse that people genuinely lived in from about 930 to 1000, built around one of the largest hearths ever found in Iceland. That odd name earns its keep. It's the tephra layer, the band of volcanic ash dated to 871±2, that caps the site, and a scrap of turf wall raised around 871 sits beneath even that, which makes this roughly the oldest man-made structure in the country and hard physical proof that people were here at the exact date the medieval sources always claimed. It rewards an unhurried hour down in the cool underground hush, and the same ticket covers the other Reykjavík City Museum sites, with children going in free. Nobody went looking for it, either: it surfaced under a construction site in 2001 and opened to visitors in 2006. The oldest walls in the country, turned up by a contractor.

Ten minutes north brings you out to the Old Harbour, where the wind comes off the water with nothing left to slow it and Harpa sits on the quay like a building that flatly refused to read the room. It's Reykjavík's concert hall and conference centre, home to the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, wrapped in a honeycomb of coloured glass that artist Olafur Eliasson and Henning Larsen Architects built as a deliberate riff on Iceland's basalt columns, the same rock the church tower was quoting this morning, only now rendered in glass instead of stone. Here's the part that lands: construction carried straight on through the 2008 financial crash, the government stepping in to bankroll a luxury concert hall while the banks around it were burning, which is either madness or defiance depending on how your morning went. It opened in 2011 and took the EU's Mies van der Rohe architecture award in 2013. Walk the public floors, three-quarters of an hour that goes mostly on watching ordinary daylight shatter into a thousand tinted cells across the glass, the facade far better from the inside looking out than any photo of the outside will admit. It stands now as the city's favourite symbol of not going under, which for a building this expensive is quite a redemption arc.

Keep going east along Sæbraut, nine minutes of open waterfront with the wind off the bay full in your face, and you reach Sólfar, the Sun Voyager, which the whole internet photographs and almost all of it misreads. Yes, the gleaming stainless-steel form looks precisely like the skeleton of a Viking ship. No, that is emphatically not what Jón Gunnar Árnason meant by it: he called it a dreamboat, an ode to the sun and to undiscovered territory, to hope, progress and freedom, a fair load to hang on a sculpture the world has unanimously filed under 'longboat.' It won a 1986 competition marking Reykjavík's 200th anniversary as a city and was unveiled in August 1990, just after the artist died. There's no ticket and no queue, and a quarter of an hour out on the exposed shore with the camera up is about all the wind will grant you anyway. Still one of the most photographed things in the country, and still, reliably, of the wrong thing.

Turn inland for the last leg, twelve minutes and a gentle climb back up off the water, and you finish the way an Icelandic day is supposed to finish: in hot water. Sundhöll Reykjavíkur is the oldest purpose-built indoor pool in the city, an Art Deco hall on Barónsstígur that opened in 1937 to the designs of, yes, him again, Guðjón Samúelsson, the same architect who handed you the tower this morning, now a few streets downhill and a whole career apart. A 2017 addition bolted on an outdoor deck with hot tubs, a cold tub, a sauna and a shallow play pool, so the ritual works whether you came alone or dragging an overheating child. This is the civic heart of the whole guide. The pool opened just as swimming became compulsory in Icelandic schools and taught the city to swim back when a bathroom at home was still a luxury, and it was among the first buildings plumbed into Reykjavík's geothermal district heating, culture as infrastructure right down to the pipes. Adult entry is 1,500 ISK, ages 10 to 17 pay 400, and small children with a guardian go free. Then you stop reading guides and lower into the hot pot, steam lifting off the surface into the cold evening air, an hour and a half gone before you notice it, a few hundred metres and about five hours, all told, from where you started the morning. As much drama as a lift and a longhouse were ever going to give you, and, sitting there, exactly enough.