The first thing you notice in the Weiße Stadt is how little it shouts. This is a housing estate in Reinickendorf, in the north of Berlin, built between 1929 and 1931 to a design by Otto Rudolf Salvisberg, with Bruno Ahrends and Wilhelm Büning, and its smooth white walls, strip windows and flat roofs were a quiet manifesto for a new way of living. It is called the White City for obvious reasons, and in the late Weimar years it was meant to show that ordinary people could have light, air and a balcony.
The estate belongs to the group of Berlin Modernism housing estates that UNESCO listed in 2008, and it is perhaps the most photogenic of them. A long bridge-like block spans the street at the entrance, with a slight curve to its profile, and the colour accents, in red and blue and ochre, on stair towers and balcony fronts, show that the architects were not austere by nature. Shops and a laundry were part of the plan, and inside the blocks are large courtyards with lawns and trees.
For a rider, Berlin is a city to be taken as it comes. The streets are wide, the traffic heavy but orderly, with tram lines, cyclists and the occasional rough cobbled stretch. Reinickendorf, in the north-west, is a leafy district with plenty of parking and the green belt of the Tegeler Forest and the lake close by, so it is a good place to ease in or out of the city. The roads north toward Brandenburg become quickly rural, with avenues of old trees and quiet villages.
The ride that includes this stop goes on to Dessau, which has its own great modernist legacy at the Bauhaus. Together they make a tour of the architecture that shaped the twentieth century. Fuel and food are no problem in a city of this size: there are petrol stations on the main roads and, in Reinickendorf, bakeries, Turkish snack bars and cafés on every corner.
Go on a calm morning, when the white walls are bright and the streets are quiet. Please remember that people live here, so keep voices and engines low.