Berlin, Germany

Berlin highlights

Kraftwerk and the international design festival
TV Tower
Legoland Discovery Centre
Berlin Wall
Playgrounds and ice cream
3 Schwestern restaurant

Why visit Berlin?

For a family-friendly city with a vibrant culture and a great mix of historical and modern sights.

Getting there and around

We visited Berlin for a short break in June 2016 when our children were 1 and 4 years old. We flew with Ryanair to Berlin from London Stansted.

To reach our accommodation we took a 30 minute S-train ride to the city centre, and then a short 5 minute metro journey on the U-bahn to our apartment, which was just 5 minutes walk from Rosenthaler Platz station.

Circus Apartments

Kraftwerk and the DMY Festival

We were lucky to be in Berlin for the DMY design festival at the Kraftwerk venue. The festival was a showcase of product and industrial design, fashion, graphic design, and digital.

The Kraftwerk building was amazing and we felt at home amongst the concrete and industrial metal, coming from brutalist Sheffield!

Berlin Wall

The East Side Gallery is a conserved part of the Berlin Wall that has been covered by street art by over 100 artists. There was some wonderful graffiti and we loved how the city has preserved this part of history and turned it into something beautiful and still meaningful.

We talked to our kids about the history of Berlin. Even though our children were still very young, we think it’s important to help our kids understand more about the historical and political context of places we visit.

TV Tower

We never seem able to resist observation towers when visiting cities. We love getting up high and taking in the view! It’s also a great way of getting one’s bearings in a new city.
We visited Berlin’s TV tower, taking the subway to Alexanderplatz station. We visited on a quiet weekday and queued for about 15 minutes to take the lift to the top.
This was a great activity with young kids, they were mesmerised by the views and found the lift ride to the top super exciting!

Legoland Discovery Centre

This was the first time we’d visited a Lego attraction and we have since realised that the world’s Legoland Discovery Centres follow a similar format. This one had a small rides, various Lego and Duplo play zones, a small soft play area, and Lego models of the city. This was a fun indoor activity with kids and we appreciated being able to take our time to play and refresh after sightseeing.

Playgrounds and ice creams

We visited Berlin in June but had a preconceived (and ignorant) idea that Berlin would be cold and grey. We hadn’t expected it would be so sunny and hot. By our third day we were quite exhausted by the heat.

Luckily Berlin is full of brilliant playgrounds and places to relax and chill. We were really impressed with the sheer number of neighbourhood playgrounds, all with excellent apparatus, within walking distance of our apartment.

We particularly loved the playground at Kollwitzplatz which had a sandpit and climbing frames, and the nearby park at Wasserturm Prenzlauer Berg (the old water tower) which was shady and had an outdoor paddling pool for the kids to cool-off in.

There were also lots of cafes and ice cream parlours which made life easy with the children. We felt that Berlin had a charming ‘cafe culture’ and was very ‘liveable’ and great for young families.
Süsse Sunde on Weinbergsweg 21 was our favourite place to get ice cream!

3 Schwestern restaurant

On our final afternoon we made our way to Mariannenplatz and the 3 Schwestern (‘3 sisters’) restaurant. The restaurant is set in a historic building with a tranquil outdoor seating area where we enjoyed delicious food including schnitzel, salad and roast pork.

Final thoughts

We were completely blown away by this amazing city! We absolutely loved the atmosphere in Berlin which was arty, young, vibrant, cool and friendly.

We intentionally didn’t try to cram in lots of the historic sights on this trip as we just didn’t think our kids would find them very interesting at such a young age.

What we did particularly enjoy was walking the Prenzlauer Berg and Pankow neighbourhoods and getting to know the parks, cafes and shops around our apartment. It was a very cool place to hang-out and we’d highly recommend Berlin for a family city break.