The stairways have names, and residents use them the way other city dwellers use street names: the Charitas-Bischoff-Treppe, Lesemanns Treppe, the Strandtreppe with its 170 steps down to the water. Because the slope was never regraded, the buildings on it stayed small - modest, close-packed houses, some still under thatch, jammed at angles that no planner would design. Fishermen's cottages from around 1850 and earlier survive among them. Op'n Kamp 9 dates to 1786. The oldest documented house in the quarter, Elbterrasse 6, goes back to roughly 1570. Getting anything in or out is a matter of shoulders and stairs, which is why household waste leaves in sacks rather than wheelie bins. The effect on a first visit is disorienting in the best way: you lose your sense of direction within two turns, then a gap between two houses opens and the whole river is suddenly there.

The name is Low German and entirely literal. Blank ness means the shining, or bare, headland - a tongue of land that once pushed out from the northern bank into the Elbe and was regularly washed by the tides. People fortified the high ground early. Around 1060 Archbishop Adalbert of Bremen built a provost's residence on the Sullberg, on the site of an older settlement. The counts of Holstein followed with a castle in 1258, and Hamburg, which did not care for a fortress overlooking its river approach, saw to its demolition in 1262. Both structures are gone. What remains is the hill itself, still the best vantage point on the Lower Elbe and still, on a clear day, giving a view across the water to the orchards of the Altes Land.

For centuries Blankenese lived off the river, a village of Elbe fishermen and river pilots. Then Hamburg's money discovered the view. From the late 18th century and through the 19th, merchant families built country houses along the crest and the Elbchaussee, in the restrained classical style the Danish architect Christian Frederik Hansen brought to the region - his Weisses Haus at Elbchaussee 547 among them. Georg Friedrich Baur raised the Landhaus Katharinenhof between 1829 and 1836. The great landscaped grounds the Baur and Godeffroy families laid out later passed into public hands and are open to anyone who climbs to them. Between roughly 1830 and 1900 the balance tipped for good, and a working waterfront settlement became one of the wealthiest residential quarters in Hamburg - roughly 13,500 people today, living on 7.7 square kilometres of hillside.

Two hulls lie in the shallows below the quarter, and both were supposed to have been removed. The Polstjernan - the Pole Star - was a four-masted Finnish powered schooner whose timber cargo caught fire on 20 October 1926 when an engine exploded as she passed through the Kiel Canal. A Blankenese salvage firm towed her here days later and moored her temporarily. Her insurers then disputed responsibility, and temporary became permanent. After the Second World War she was weighted down with scrap submarine parts to stop her floating on flood tides, and she has served as a breakwater ever since. A few metres away lie the remains of the barge Uwe, sunk in 1975 after a collision with the coaster Wiedau; most of her wreckage was towed off, but the stern proved too heavy and was left where it fell. Both are officially hazards to small craft. Both are also, at low tide, walkable and much loved, which is why they are still there.

From January 1946 to April 1948 a property belonging to the Warburg family, on the heights above the river, housed a home for children who had survived the Holocaust - orphans from Hungary and Poland, waiting here in a quiet German suburb before emigrating to Palestine. It is not the association most visitors arrive with, and it sits oddly against the postcard, which is exactly why it is worth knowing. Blankenese's own administrative history is quieter: a merger with Dockenhuden in 1919, absorption into Altona under the Gross-Altona law of 1927 over local objections, and finally into Hamburg with the Greater Hamburg Act of 1938. The river keeps changing too. When the Elbe fairway was deepened, a new pair of leading lights went up in the summer of 2020 to guide ships in, and the old pair came down that autumn.