Military advisors opposed the plan … they were keen to expropriate all the land outside the embankments and then to resell the plots to finance new outer defences beyond the lakes. A demolition committee rejected this and produced a new plan in 1865 with dense blocks of new buildings but for the first time proposed a new Botanical Garden that extended outwards the open space of the King’s Garden with a clear formal relationship with the new hospital, completed in 1863, beyond that. Unlike Seidelin, they proposed that the Tivoli Garden should be retained.
There was an intermediate plan of 1866 that went as far as to propose a complete arc of open parks on the line of the moats but the final or “ratified” plan of 1872 kept Tivoli Garden and established three large parks on the line of the moat … Ørstedsparken, the Botanical Gardens and Østre Anlaeg.
Work on removing the walls and some of the defensive ditches did not start in earnest until the 1870s. and the layout of new streets was, in the end, very different from Sedelin’s scheme, retaining not just Kastellet but also some of the ditches. A phenomenal number of new apartment buildings were constructed establishing a basic form, with courtyards, communal staircases and relatively mixed accommodation with, in many buildings, relatively large apartments on the first and second floors over, in many cases, shops or offices. There was clearly some, to use modern terms, social zoning with working-class apartments - for instance east of Israels Plads - and many with a single room but with much grander blocks along Grønningen and then later along Dag Hammarskjölds Allé where there were some apartments with 12 or more large rooms and complex arrangements for servants.
What is interesting about the plan, as it evolved, is that in the end there were substantially more open areas and public buildings than Seidelin had proposed. Sections of the defensive ditch were retained as lakes at the centre of large new public parks and gardens and some of the finest and most important public buildings in the city were constructed on the land opened up by clearing the city walls including a new city hall, a new national art gallery, the Glyptotek museum and gallery, libraries, academic institutions and the botanic gardens.
Building work progressed rapidly and, by the last years of the 19th century, blocks of apartments were being built well beyond the lakes as the new areas of Vesterbro, Fredriksberg, Nørrebro and Østerbro developed rapidly.
Many of the apartment buildings within the lakes were incredibly grand with bravado shows of craftsmanship in the brickwork, stonework and plasterwork of their facades. There must have been an amazing army of skilled brick layers, masons and plasterers in the city and, above all, this must have been the time when the furniture and other design trades in Copenhagen really became established on a commercial scale to decorate and furnish all those new apartments.