The Swimming Pool at the Ihme Center

© Matthias Kothe

Seek and ye shall find

Basically, that’s always been the motto at the Ihme-Zentrum. The massive concrete structure is so winding and confusing in many places that you need a very good sense of direction to avoid getting lost right away in the complex, which is now dilapidated in many areas. And where exactly is—or was—the supposed swimming pool? The scavenger hunt begins the moment you enter the Ihme-Zentrum, which extends across multiple levels both upward and downward, shifting the familiar into a different dimension: While the underground parking garage is located at street level and the level below it, the shopping arcade is on the first floor above and is (or rather, was) accessible via escalators and walkways.

Anyone who now enters the Ihme-Zentrum via Spinnereistraße in the north, across from the three “Drei warme Brüder” statues at the Linden cogeneration plant, finds themselves at the level of the upper parking deck of the underground garage and walks along the narrow sidewalk toward Schwarzer Bär, with a view of the Ihme River, straight along an unplastered wall of white sand-lime brick —and right behind it is said to have been the swimming pool where no one ever swam. Supposedly, this ghostly bathing facility served as an archive for Hannover’s public utilities in the 1980s. Nothing in this eerily dark passageway—with its construction fences, bare concrete pillars, and wooden walls—suggests any of that today. Really, nothing at all?

© Matthias Kothe

Not here and not quite: if you continue from the sand-lime brick wall towards the main entrance to the Lee Gym martial arts school, after a few steps to the left you will reach a narrow spiral staircase leading upwards. The last step takes you up to the level above the former and now dilapidated shopping arcade, which is cordoned off throughout. Amidst the desolate emptiness underfoot and the small idyll in the greenery on the upper floor, you can see the former ventilation shafts of the never-operational swimming pool below - recognizable by their yellow-painted ventilation grilles above the dark brown wooden cladding. If you take a closer look, you will also notice the magnificent view of the city's rooftops from up there. 

When a plan becomes a utopia

Another open secret of the Ihme Center—which, incidentally, was built on the sites of the Mechanical Weaving Mill (closed in 1961) and the Linden Baking Powder and Bread Factory—is that it is completely invisible: The complex as a whole—and specifically in the area of Ihmeplatz—was designed in such a way that an underground tunnel for the planned D line of the Üstra light rail system in Hanover could have been built beneath the foundation at a later date. As is well known, this has not happened to this day, nor has the planned swimming pool been opened, nor, unfortunately, has the long-overdue renovation and revitalization of the approximately 285,000-square-meter “city within a city” taken place.