Photographer Ulrich Weichert has spent decades documenting Berlin, and a new feature on his work zooms in on a stretch of the city's history that feels almost unrecognisable now: the Wall's gritty, unpolished decades between 1971 and 1991.

Weichert, who grew up in Bonn and trained under Cologne photographers Karl-Hugo Schmolz and Walde Huth before studying art in Cologne, didn't move to Berlin permanently until 1999. But he'd been visiting since the early 1970s, hitchhiking or driving over in old cars with friends and crashing at his brother's shared flat on Zimmerstrasse. His sleeping arrangement? A cramped room above the bathroom where he couldn't stand upright — with a view of the Springer building on one side and the death strip and a watchtower directly in front.

That flat became a front-row seat to Cold War Berlin. The building was originally marked for demolition, and as neighbours moved out only the shared apartments hung on. Late arrivals after 8 p.m. had to know the trick: slip through the back basement entrance, cross the courtyard and head upstairs. In the basement corridors, Weichert would run into American GIs stationed in guardhouses across the street, and he suspected a camera in the apartment's bay window — filming Friedrichstrasse to the east — belonged to the Americans too. He compares the atmosphere to the spy fiction of John le Carré and Ross Thomas.

In 1973 he started his "Kreuzberg 74" project, walking the old postal districts of Kreuzberg 36 and 61 with his camera. Through the 1980s he returned several times a year, catching the city that Iggy Pop and David Bowie turned into myth. When the Wall finally fell, he was back in December 1989 and January 1990, photographing the Brandenburg Gate, the Martin Gropius Bau, Bernauer Strasse and Prenzlauer Berg in those strange, open-border early months.

Weichert later ran the photo editing department at the Federal Government's Press Office and taught photography, but he now works as an artist focused on portraits, street scenes and architecture — shooting almost entirely in natural light with small, discreet cameras like a Leica Q and Ricoh, and switching to a Rolleiflex or analogue Hasselblad for formal portrait and architecture work.

For travellers, this is a reminder that the Berlin you walk through today is layered. Zimmerstrasse, Checkpoint Charlie and Bernauer Strasse all carry the exact scenes Weichert shot — and prints of his work will soon be available on his website if you want to take a piece of that era home.