Refshaleøen is a former industrial site in the harbor of Copenhagen, Denmark, originally on a separate island but now annexed to the larger island of Amager. For more than a hundred years, it was home to the shipyard Burmeister & Wain, which closed in 1996.
In 1624, a block house was built on the original island, then much smaller, to guard the entrance to Copenhagen harbor together with St. Ann’s Fortress (now Kastellet) on the coast just north of city. Reclamation increased the size of the island considerably in the 1870s when the port’s waterways were made deeper. Burmeister & Wain established a shipyard on the island in 1871. At its height, the shipyard employed 8,000 people, and so appears as an icon of Danish industrial history.
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