Natalie Holmes gives the low-down on her local Kreuzberg Straße…

Reichenberger Straße is a long road. At least, that’s what I thought when I first set foot on it during one of Berlin’s sweltering midsummer days, fresh off the plane from the comparatively tiny, winding streets of London.

“It’s on this road, so we can’t be far off”, I exclaimed naively to my fellow flat-hunter as we walked further and further along.

A full fifteen minutes later – and ten minutes late – we arrived at our destination – an apartment viewing. This cultural faux pas, I realise now, could easily have resulted in a tragic loss of opportunity. But things must have been different back then, since there was no queue of hopeful tenants  guardedly lining the block.

I say “back then” like it was a different era: it was just over three years ago. But due to the remarkable speed of its development since the wall fell, years in Berlin (at least in certain parts of the inner city) are like dog years, each one seemingly incorporating several in terms of local transformations.

Having since experienced the vastness of eastern neighbourhoods like Prenzlauer Berg, my local street no longer seems as endless as it once did, but it has certainly seen some change.

Stretched out between Kottbusser Tor at one end (in fact a little beyond it) to a small but significant perpendicular stretch of canal linking the Spree to the Landwehr Canal, Reichenberger Straße enjoys the close company of Görlitzer Park to the north and Paul-Lincke-Ufer to the south.

Located in the SO36 part of Kreuzberg, the area has a rich cultural history. A pocket of West Berlin surrounded on three sides by the East, the Kiez was populated by a post-war migrant Turkish community who settled in numbers big enough to earn their adopted area the nickname Little Istanbul.

Then, in the late 60s, now almost surrounded by the Wall and home to numerous squats, SO36 started to become popular with students and artists, sparking the beginning of the area’s alternative, punk scene. Today, Reichenberger Straße remains a key location for the May Day riots.

After the Wall fell, east Kreuzberg and its residents suddenly found themselves exposed and the initially very cheap rents drew in a wider variety of residents. According to Wikipedia, “its population has been swapped completely twice in the last two decades”.

As a sample slice of SO36, this rich rece…