Where to stay in Frankfurt

Bahnhofsviertel

Nearly all the city’s hotels cluster here, and the reason is geometric: the main station is at the door, with the airport train ten minutes away and the ICE to half of Europe, and the old town a quarter of an hour on foot. It also eats better than any other quarter in Frankfurt. On paper there’s no argument.

Off paper: the same streets have a red-light district with windows, and drug use in plain sight, and both are fifty metres from perfectly ordinary hotels. The city has handled it this way deliberately for decades, under a public-health policy that gets studied abroad.

The main streets walk fine. What you don’t do is cut through the alleys at night. If that’s going to bother you, sleep one stop further out.

Altstadt and Römer

The old town has few hotels because it has few buildings, and the ones there are sit inside the rebuilt square. The advantage is obvious and slightly rigged: you leave the hotel and you’ve already arrived, cathedral thirty metres away, river a hundred. The catch is that this quarter has no life of its own. It’s somewhere you come to, not somewhere you are: after seven, once the day coaches leave, there are four expensive restaurants and not much else. It works very well for a one-night layover where you want to see everything and vanish. It works badly for three days.

Sachsenhausen

Across the river another city begins: low houses, cobbled streets, the Apfelwein taverns packed into a handful of blocks and the Museumsufer’s row of museums along the water. It’s the quarter with the most character of its own and the only one that feels like a village.

You sleep well here and eat traditionally, with the caveat that the tavern part has terrace noise until late in summer and that the area fills at weekends. The centre is a ten-minute walk over the Eiserner Steg, which is the best stroll in the city anyway.

If you’re here two or three nights and don’t depend on the train, this is the choice.

Nordend and Bornheim

North of the centre, with nothing to see in the tourist sense: nineteenth-century buildings that survived the bombs, streets with trees, bakeries, people. Bornheim has a street, the Berger Straße, that’s one of the longest in Germany and works as the spine of everything: bars, market, terraces. This is where you stay if you’re here a week for work, or if you’ve done Frankfurt already and don’t need the cathedral again. The centre is ten minutes by U-Bahn. And it’s where you best see something the skyline hides: that underneath all the money, Frankfurt is a mid-sized and fairly quiet town.

Westend

In the Westend the nineteenth-century bankers lived and the current ones still do: big villas, wide streets, and the Palmengarten, the botanical garden, in the middle. It’s pressed against the financial district but is its exact reverse, and at nine in the evening you don’t hear a car.

You sleep here for quiet and because it’s a quarter of an hour’s walk from nearly everything. There’s no street life: there are neighbourhood cafés and little else, so you eat elsewhere.

It’s a good option if you’re with family and the Bahnhofsviertel doesn’t appeal, and if price isn’t deciding.