The northern third of the Kvadraturen, between Kristian IV's gate and the cathedral, is the oldest surviving residential quarter in Kristiansand — a dense grid of low white wooden houses, narrow yards and tiny gardens, almost all built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries after a series of fires elsewhere in the city. A serious effort by the residents in the 1970s saved it from demolition; today it is a protected conservation area and one of the largest wooden-house neighbourhoods in northern Europe.
Walk it slowly. The houses are still lived in — no museum, no roped-off areas — and the best of it is the texture rather than any single building: shuttered windows, scrubbed white planks, the lilac and apple trees in the back yards. The little streets are at their best on a still summer evening when the light goes golden across the wood.