Housing in St Petersburg

The historical centre of St Petersburg roughly corresponds to the “golden triangle” bounded by Palace Embankment, the River Fontanka and Gorokhovaya Street. Home to many famous museums, palaces and cathedrals, this is a particularly desirable place to live.

The centre is surrounded by a number of other historical districts located on islands, including Admiralty District (home to the Mariinsky Theatre), Vasilyevsky Island and the Petrograd Side. Most of the housing in these districts is pre-revolutionary (stary fond) and an eclectic mix of Baroque, Neoclassical and Art Nouveau architecture.

After the revolution, there was a plan to move the city centre away from the River Neva to Moskovsky District in the south. Many examples of Soviet Neoclassical architecture and elite Communist housing (stalinki) were built there in the 1930s and 1940s.

After the Second World War, a number of new regions or “dormitory towns” appeared on the outskirts of Leningrad. Large estates of pre-fabricated housing (khruschovki and brezhnevki) were built in such districts as Grazhdanka, Avtovo, Vesyoly Posyolok and Kupchino.

The city continued to expand in the post-Soviet period, developing such new residential zones as the “Baltic Pearl” project on the Gulf of Finland. Modern townhouses (kottedzhi) have been built in the new suburbs of New Scandinavia in the north and Neudorf in the south.

St Petersburg is surrounded by a “necklace” of towns based around the former imperial palaces and parks of Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, Pavlovsk and Gatchina. They contain a mixture of all the aforementioned architectural styles.