‘I CAN remember as a kid when this was all just a chaotic old-fashioned market,” reminisces my guide Katy Janoušková from Prague City Adventures as we survey the collage of hipster cafés and delis that have moved into Holešovice’s old meat market and slaughterhouse.
“It has all changed around Holešovice and Letná, with Prague’s coolest quarters now here in Prague 7.”
Ten years ago I was in Prague – a city I’ve been fortunate to visit over 20 times since 1992 – reporting on the up-and-coming district of Žižkov.
“Holešovice and Letná are the new Žižkov,” smiles Katy, who grew up here. “This is where creative people and people with new ideas come to meet and open new enterprises. A sprinkling of tourists are starting to discover us too, the ones who can manage to break away from our famous Old Town.”
Prague’s Old Town and its surrounding historic web of streets do have an irresistible pull, a sprawling magnet, larger in its own right than some cities. That has always made it hard for other parts of Prague to get noticed.
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A visible sign of the local authorities’ determination to change that is the sweeping new pedestrian bridge to Holešovice.
On the other side, the massive new Vltava Philharmonic Hall is emerging and a new transport hub is being created. The hall will be designed by the Danish creatives BIG and it will house the Municipal Library of Prague, a rooftop restaurant, and a trio of performance halls.
It will become the new home of the Prague Symphony Orchestra FOK and the Czech Philharmonic, fashioned to become one of Central Europe’s cultural fulcrums, with a public park opening up around it too.
Nearby there are already plenty of visitors to the reborn Holešovice Market.
We sip on freshly roasted coffee before flitting through the street food stalls and spying galleries, as the bright new citizens of Holešovice swish by on electric scooters. The bountiful fruit and vegetable market – Prague’s largest – is a throwback to the old days, and a reassuring sign that Prague 7 is not totally giving itself over to the hipster zeitgeist.
An eclectic collage of people live and work in Prague 7, one of the city’s most cosmopolitan districts.
At VNITROBLOCK, I meet Ukrainian barman Alex Freeman, who says: “It used to just been locals coming here, but more tourists are coming looking for an alternative to the Old Town.”
Prague 7 is no poor relation to the Old Town. Architecturally, it is spectacular, with a style Katy calls “Prague Eclectic”. The grand streets are alive with grand buildings that dabble in Art Deco, Art Nouveau and Czech Cubism, with swathes of modern glass and steel reinventing some of the more dilapidated structures in recent years and reinventing gap sites, a process that continues apace as new money flows in.
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Holešovice and Letná’s buildings are put to good use with a swathe of galleries, from the Veletržní Palace, which is part of the National Gallery with a collection spanning across the 20th and 21st centuries, through to the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art and Jatka78, a modern circus and eclectic performance space and gallery at Holešovice Market. Like in Glasgow, the facades of a number of Prague 7 buildings have been given over to striking street art.
The wave of new money is evident as I walk into neighbouring Letná. Horákové is the main thoroughfare that leads uphill to Letná’s eponymous main square. It is bursting with new life as new businesses spread brightness along the wide boulevard. A flurry of further independent cafés tempt, along with clothing boutiques and vintage stores. There is a vegan butcher and cannabis product shops in a Prague district that even has a café that only accepts cryptocurrency as payment.
I end my explorations in Prague 7 in Letná’s sprawling park, which offers the best view of the Old Town and the lifeblood river Vltava possible. The park used to house the world’s largest Stalin statue. The stern, moustached one has been replaced with a new pond and the city’s best beer garden; Soviet austerity usurped with a wave of joy and laughter.
As I sip on a local craft beer and watch the sun melt over the old town across the river I toast to breaking free of that remarkable Old Town and exploring an altogether different Prague.
Ryanair ( www.ryanair.com) flies to Prague from Edinburgh. Tourist information: www.visitczechia.com
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