Copenhagen: Plan the Trip from This Episode of Travel Man
- X
Explore the Danish Capital: Copenhagen
Copenhagen is sure to reveal itself to you at your own pace. Between good food and avant-garde design, castles and cathedrals, this romantic stay is a true ode to Scandinavian-style relaxation!
Richard Ayoade and Noel Fielding are not natural athletes. That becomes clear early in this episode of Travel Man when they join a bike tour through Copenhagen and promptly get left behind by their guide. It's a good opener for the city: Copenhagen rewards exactly this kind of unhurried observation, and the duo's slightly bedraggled progress through its streets captures something real about the place.
This is Series 2, Episode 3 of Travel Man, and it plays to the format's strengths. Fielding, best known as Ayoade's IT Crowd co-star and a regular on Great British Bake Off, brings a looser, more curious energy to the trip. Together they move through Copenhagen with the show's characteristic mix of dry efficiency and low-grade chaos.
Start on Two Wheels
The bike tour with Bike Copenhagen with Mike is where the episode begins, and it's a reasonable first move. Copenhagen is a city that organises itself around cycling in a way few places do, and covering it by bike in the early hours of a trip gives you a spatial understanding of the place that a taxi or metro ride simply doesn't. You'll be slow. That's fine.
Eat What the City Does Best
Food gets proper attention here. The episode visits Sankt Peders Bageri, the city's oldest bakery, for Danish pastries that bear only a passing resemblance to what gets sold under that name elsewhere. Then Aamanns for smørrebrød: the open-faced rye bread sandwiches that are Denmark's most underrated contribution to the lunch table. Don't skip these. They're not a novelty item — they're a genuinely good meal.
Richard Ayoade and Noel Fielding work through a spread of smørrebrød at Aamanns. The open-faced rye bread sandwiches are well known in Copenhagen.
The Carlsberg Experience
The Carlsberg brewery museum earns its place on the itinerary as something other than a tourist obligation. The beer tasting element gives it structure, and the history of the brewery is bound up with Copenhagen's cultural development in ways that make it more interesting than a straightforward brand tour.
Art Below Ground
The Cisterns is an underground reservoir beneath Frederiksberg Hill that hosts immersive art installations. It's dark, cavernous, and nothing like the rest of the city's cultural offering. In the episode it reads as one of Ayoade's reliable quirky detours, but it stands on its own merits as a place worth visiting.
Rundetaarn and the Round Tower
The Round Tower, built in the 17th century as an astronomical observatory, offers a rooftop view of the old city and a climb that's wide enough to have famously accommodated a horse-drawn carriage. It's central, it's quick, and the view earns the walk up.
The Round Tower's interior ramp winds upward to a rooftop view of the old city. It was built wide enough, legend has it, for a horse and carriage.
Christiania
Fielding and Ayoade pass through Christiania, the self-governing community established in the 1970s in a former military barracks. It's a neighbourhood with its own rules, its own aesthetic, and a long-standing status as one of Copenhagen's most talked-about places. Whether you find it fascinating or a bit much depends on your tolerance for organised counterculture, but it's a genuine part of the city's identity.
Tivoli Gardens
The rollercoasters come at the end, at Tivoli Gardens, one of the world's oldest amusement parks and a persistent fixture in Copenhagen's social life. It opens in the evening and stays open late, which makes it a natural close to a full day. The rides are not the point, exactly — the atmosphere is. Gas lanterns, fairground rides, a concert hall, and a sense that Danes simply use this place regularly rather than treating it as a once-in-a-decade occasion.
Where to Stay
They stay at Hotel Alexandra, a mid-century modernist property in the city centre whose furniture and design choices are deliberately matched to the era. It fits Copenhagen's broader design culture without trying too hard, and it's within walking distance of most of what the episode covers.
Plan Your Copenhagen Trip
A trip built around this episode works well as the Copenhagen anchor of a wider Scandinavian itinerary. Customisable from 7 to 10 days, it can extend north to the Danish coast or connect through to Sweden.
Explore the Copenhagen itinerary on JournyGo
Explore the Danish Capital: Copenhagen
Copenhagen is sure to reveal itself to you at your own pace. Between good food and avant-garde design, castles and cathedrals, this romantic stay is a true ode to Scandinavian-style relaxation!
- X
