Ett litet stycke av Helsingborg: Om flytt och framväxt av stadskvarteren på Fredriksdal

A piece of Helsingborg – about the moving of older buildings from the town and the making of an urban area at the Fredriksdal open-air museum The article tells the different stories of how fifteen houses, which during a period from the late 1930s until the 1960s, were moved from the town centre to the open-air museum at Fredriksdal, a part of the municipality museum.
It depicts the struggle between modernisation and preservation of old neighbourhoods in the city centre. If older precious buildings had to be demolished, it was up to the museums officials to at least document them in a proper way. Already in the beginning of the 20th century there existed a belief that buildings could be preserved by moving them to another place. It turned out to be much more complicated and more expensive, to move and rebuild townhouses than buildings from the countryside. The first part of the article describes the power play between the museum officials, striving politicians and building contractors. This concerned which buildings should be preserved in-situ, as well as which ones that should be moved to the museum and how this could be funded. The second part explores the process from documentation on the original site to the rebuilding at the open-air museum. What was documented, which building materials were preserved and then reused, which actors were involved and how they interacted are some of the questions that are asked. The end result is, despite the museums ambitions for authenticity and quest for scientific procedures in handling the moves, that the houses are quite different from the ones that were deconstructed.