By Skoge Farman
Täby municipality isn’t the most touristy place in Sweden, but it’s where I’ve lived for my entire life. Most of it used to be farmland but it experienced rapid development during the 1950s, 60s and 70s (fuelled by housing shortages in nearby Stockholm) and transformed into the suburban area it is today.
The streets and walkways are calm here and I find it enjoyable to explore them with a
camera around my neck.
The municipality has a core of larger buildings and apartments built during the 1950s and ‘60s surrounded by large areas with houses built during the ‘70s. As Täby is yet again going through rapid development (fuelled by another housing shortage in Stockholm) new apartment complexes in a more modern style have sprung up.
For those interested in military history I can recommend a visit to the bunker and trench system known as The Northern Front. It was built during the First World War to stop a potential invader progressing towards Stockholm from southern Roslagen, but fortunately was never used. The bunkers and trenches now lay abandoned and overgrown in the forested parts of Täby, so be prepared to do some walking.
Other places would be Näsby manor, which used to be a navy officer school, and the remnants of the old air flotilla F2 Hägernäs. Today the manor is being used as a hotel, while the remnant buildings of F2 Hägernäs have been incorporated into the surrounding residential area. The buildings, except for F2 Hägernäs hangar bay which were repainted, still retain their original exteriors.
As Täby has been inhabited for about 3,000 years, there are a lot of remnants from Bronze and Iron Age people dotted about. Most of them are small grave mounds that can be quite hard to distinguish but in the north-western corner of the municipality stands two really nice runestones. They are located in Fällbro and Skålhamra respectively and those places are a good example of how Täby used to look during the 1930s and ‘40s.
For lovers of brutalist architecture I recommend a visit to the apartment complex Grindtorp. The architect Sune Lindström took inspiration from Le Corbusier when designing the buildings and they were featured in the MoMA exhibition Transformations in Modern Architecture in 1979.
If you’re feeling a bit tired after visiting some of these places you can stop by Viggbyholms stationskafé. Occupying an old train station house it serves nice coffee and handmade, organic pastries and has been featured in the White Guide (a guidebook for the best restaurants and cafés in Sweden) several years in a row.
The photographs for this article were taken with a Zorki-4 (second version) sporting a Jupiter-12 35mm 1:2.8 lens and KMZ turret viewfinder. I had neglected the camera for several months now, in favour of my Pentax Spotmatic SPII, and thought it would benefit from being taken out for a walk. The camera is nice for what it is and even though it hasn’t got the smoothest mechanics or the clearest rangefinder patch it does its job well enough.
The lens flares easily and loses contrast if it gets hit by stray light but can produce nice photographs if you keep the Sun away from it. The turret viewfinder is really nice and works well with glasses, but be aware that you can scratch them on the viewfinder if you’re not careful.
- Täby on a Zorki-4 - 11/07/2021
