Raffish, rowdy, creative and irreverent – that’s Kreuzberg. Though slightly eclipsed in the 1990s, when the hip were colonising the former GDR neighbourhoods of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, this area once again reigns undisputedly as ‘where it’s at’. Many connoisseurs of cool, however, might insist that this only holds true for the ‘36,’ referring to SO36, the old West Berlin postal designation (for Sud Ost or southeast 36).

Historically, Kreuzberg is the poorest and most densely populated part of Berlin; its location against the Berlin Wall left residents to their own devices for much of the Cold War. All that changed once the Wall came down. Today, many of the Turkish immigrants and the hip who gave the neighbourhood its character have been pushed south to Neukölln.

Since 2001, Kreuzberg has been joined at the Oberbaumbrücke bridge (the only connection point) with neighbouring Friedrichshain, though few on either side identify with this administrative unit. On its own, Kreuzberg, despite its reputation, is not a single place but a multiplicity of worlds. Within its borders you’ll find the hippest nightspots, weirdest park, the Jewish museum, and ‘the biggest Turkish city outside of Turkey’. You’ll also find more graffiti-per-square-metre of exposed masonry than just about anywhere else – plenty of it crude and quite a lot of it exquisitely rendered, which is pretty much a visual metaphor for Kreuzberg itself.