Ehrenstraße

This guide to Ehrenstrasse in Cologne starts with a narrow gap between two blank brick shopfronts and the question of what they were built to hide. It leads you through to Kleine Brinkgasse, a short passage that served for roughly a century and a half as the city's red-light alley, and the nineteen sixties decision to wall it off with a dogleg entrance open only to men. It follows the nineteen seventies fight over relocating the trade to a new high-rise brothel on Hornstrasse, a battle the workers who lived it did not win. Walk the boutiques and cafe tables of today's car-free street and see if you can spot the gap.