Cars at the Top

postcard norway veidirektør Hans Hagerup Krag

Some blog posts just get out of hand. I think this is one of them.

Most of the postcards and photos I feature in this blog are from the UK but occasionally I include something from further afield. I was in a junk shop in Shrewsbury a few months ago and came across a bundle of postcards from various places around the world.  None of them had been posted and I imagine they were bought as  mementos of someone’s holidays, perhaps instead of taking their own photos.  They were remarkably cheap – 50p each if I remember rightly, so naturally I bought all those with ‘cars on streets,’ including this one of the Kragstøtten sculpture & viewpoint in Oslo.

I’ve never been to Norway and didn’t know anything about this sculpture so started searching on the Web.  Typing in the words on the front of the card (Utsikt over Fjorden Kragstøtten) threw up the exact same postcard, for sale on ebay at €20. I also found the same image, listed with a Creative Commons licence on the OsloBilder website, see  View from Kragstøtten .  The text accompanying the image notes that the photographer is unknown and mistakenly describes the scene as “Panorama beyond Bygdøy and fjord towards Nesoddlandet from the viewpoint of Voksenkollveien. Statue of veidirektør Hans Hagerup Krag. Two parked cars.” Any reader of this blog will have immediately seen three parked cars, the middle one probably being the most interesting.

Looking through the OsloBilder collection you can find more old images of Kragstøtten with cars parked in front of the statue and I assumed that I would not find any contemporary ones as they would probably have banned cars from going up there by now. However, as you will see that is not the case.

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All these photos are a little before my time, but other images can be found elsewhere on the web from later times where cars are still allowed up there.

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Finally we have these photos from April 2013 when the Norwegian Veteran Car Club met at Kragstøtten to celebrate the centenary of the Motor Vehicle Act, which allowed Norwegians to drive freely around the country without first having to get official permission for their journey.

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So who is Hans Hagerup Krag?

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Well, fittingly for this blog, he was the Norwegian Road Commissioner from 1874 to 1903 and without him there would not have been any cars on streets or indeed my postcard.

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