Once upon a time

On New Year's Day 1835, in a gabled house on the waterfront of Copenhagen's Nyhavn (New Harbour), a shoemaker's son from Odense sat writing at a table by the window of his lodgings. Below him, tall wooden sailing ships were moored at the quayside, in a narrow canal leading out to sea just as they are today. Ice-flats were starting to form on the freezing water. But his study was cosy, lit by a fire and hung with Christmas decorations. "I am now starting on some 'fairy tales for children'," he wrote to a friend. "I am going to win over future generations, you may want to know."

By this time, Hans Christian Andersen was 29 years old. Fifteen years previously, a gawky teenager, he had arrived entirely alone in his adopted city. He had brought with him savings of about £130, a bundle of shabby clothes and an unfaltering belief in his own genius that was now about to be realised. The worldwide acclaim that followed publication of his first collection of fairy tales enabled the small-town ugly duckling to become the society swan he had always longed to be.

"I arrived with my small parcel in Copenhagen, a poor stranger of a boy," he wrote proudly in 1844. "And today I have drunk my chocolate with the Queen, sitting opposite her and the King at table."

Andersen's love affair with Denmark's capital was total. From early childhood it had been his dream city, and the Copenhagen that features so frequently in his stories is still remarkably intact. In The Tinder Box, the soldier-hero meets three dogs – one with eyes as big as tea-cups, one with eyes as big as mill-wheels and the third with eyes as big as the Rundetarn (Round Tower). This famous observatory, built in 1642, is one of Copenhagen's best-known landmarks. If you climb to the top, via a unique cobbled causeway, the breathtaking views over churches and palaces, gardens and waterways, and narrow streets crowded with red roofs and green copper spires still allow you, all these years later, to experience something very like Andersen's own first sight of the city.

Alighting early from the coach from Odense at the hilltop suburb of Frederiksberg, he walked the final 10 miles into Copenhagen utterly exhilarated by the glittering panorama that spread out below him. "If a marble city with golden roofs had lain before him," he wrote in his semi-autobiographical novel Only A Fiddler, as the hero Christian arrives in Copenhagen, "he would not have been astonished. His imagination was prepared for anything."

The bustle of Copenhagen's street life was endlessly fascinating to the young Andersen, and many of the fairy stories vividly evoke the markets and street-traders that still enliven the city. "Goodness gracious, what a lot of gold there was!", thought the soldier from The Tinder Box. "There was enough for him to buy the whole of Copenhagen, all the sugar-pigs that the cake-women sell, and all the tin soldiers and whips and rocking horses in the world."

Copenhagen's bustling Gammeltorv (Old Market Square), where the 19th-century street vendors touted their wares, was a mere stone's throw from Andersen's first lodgings at 18 Vestergade. The oldest square in the city, Gammeltorv remains a colourful hub of activity, especially in the summer. Now, it's a part of the city's five-street chain, known as the Stroget, which links Radhuspladsen (Town Hall Square), near the railway station, with Kongens Nytorv (King's New Square), near the harbour.

Stroget is claimed to be Europe's longest pedestrianised street, a retail promenade of designer boutiques and porcelain, pewter and silver shops. It displays now, as then, the emblems of wealth that the beggar children of Andersen's stories could only stare at wide-eyed. Visit Stroget in the run-up to Christmas, with snowflakes whirling and shop windows festooned with baubles and bows, and it's not hard to imagine the ghost of the little match girl lingering in a doorway.

At the harbourside end of Stroget, the imposing (though now traffic-filled) expanse of Kongens Nytorv was another Andersen haunt. From 1838 until 1847 he lived in a suite at the old Hotel du Nord overlooking the Square, currently a large department store called Magasin du Nord. Significantly, his rooms looked directly across at Det Kongelige Teater (Royal Theatre), the national theatre of Denmark, founded in 1748. Andersen's own thespian ambitions as a stage-struck 14- year-old had been quickly crushed, not least because of his lack of matinée-idol looks. His only public performance during a brief spell as a pupil at the Royal Theatre's Ballet School was as a troll. But he continued to adore the theatre, and visited it most evenings. It was at this time that he first met Jenny Lind, the famous singer known as "the Swedish Nightingale". His unrequited love for her inspired his fairy story, The Nightingale, about an Emperor saved from death by the song of a bird he once despised.

The Nightingale describes a palace in China, surrounded by flower gardens and lit by thousands of golden lamps. Copenhagen's magical Tivoli Gardens had opened as a pleasure park in 1843, and Andersen drew happily on their layout for his detail. The gardens are still one of the city's major attractions, a crazy extravaganza of funfair rides, oriental pavilions, flowers, fountains, lakes and theatres, all illuminated at night by fairy lights and fireworks.

During the Christmas season, the lake by the Chinese Tower becomes a huge skating rink, lit by a quarter of a million coloured lanterns strung throughout surrounding trees. Watching the children skate, I found myself thinking of young Kay from The Snow Queen, who was promised "the whole world and a new pair of skates" if he could make the word "eternity" from shards of ice.

For the most famous Andersen character of all, though, you need to go back to the harbour. Disappointingly, Eriksen's much-photographed bronze statue of the Little Mermaid is located in distinctly unpicturesque surroundings along the blustery Langelinie quay, at the entrance to Copenhagen's harbour. But the mermaid's spiritual home is both easier and much more pleasant to visit. The story was written in 1837, in the lodgings at 20 Nyhavn, a pretty terrace of brightly painted houses, right beside the water. This was Andersen's favourite street in Copenhagen (he spent more than 20 years lodging there) and it remains as charming, as convivial and as colourful as ever. In the summer, the waterfront bustles with outdoor cafés. In the winter, there are stalls selling mulled wine and pretzels, and there are braziers for roasting chestnuts. And the sounds that Andersen would have heard as he worked ­ the masts clinking in the harbour close by, and, in stormy weather, the roar of the open sea beyond ­ can still be heard today. More than 150 years on, Hans Christian Andersen's Copenhagen can still enchant.

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