Stavanger, before and after the oil

Stavanger's old town, Gamle Stavanger, is one of the best-preserved collections of wooden houses in northern Europe: around 250 white, timber-clad buildings, most of them dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, laid out along narrow cobbled lanes above the harbour. They were built on herring, or more precisely on the canning industry that grew up around it, which for a long stretch of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries made Stavanger one of Norway's wealthier towns and, at its peak, home to well over fifty canneries.

The white paint on those houses was itself a small economic signal in its day: lead-based white paint was expensive, and a town that could afford to coat several hundred buildings in it, uniformly, was a town with genuine money behind it. Stavanger could, and largely still does; the colour has become something close to a civic identity rather than simply a maintenance habit.

When the herring left, and something else arrived

The herring fishery declined through the mid-twentieth century, and Stavanger's fortunes declined with it, until 1969, when the Ekofisk field, discovered in Norwegian waters of the North Sea, turned out to hold one of the largest oil reserves ever found in the region. Stavanger, already a port with the harbour infrastructure and maritime skills the new industry needed, became Norway's oil capital in the years that followed, and the effects were not subtle: an industry that had barely existed in Norway before 1969 went on to fund, in large part, the country's sovereign wealth fund, now among the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.

That fund was a deliberate policy choice rather than an accident of geology; Norway's government decided early on to save a substantial share of the oil revenue for future generations rather than spend it as it arrived, a decision that a number of other oil-producing nations have since studied, and rather fewer have managed to copy with the same discipline.

A museum shaped like what it explains

The Norwegian Petroleum Museum, on the harbour a short walk from the old town, opened in 1999 in a building deliberately designed to echo the platforms and rock formations of the industry it covers, and it makes no particular effort to be neutral about the scale of what happened here: a fishing town that became, within a couple of decades, the base for an industry that reshaped the entire Norwegian economy. Whatever view a visitor takes of oil, the museum is a useful corrective to any idea that Norway's wealth was simply always there; it was, for a long time, a herring town like several others on this coast, until it very suddenly wasn't.

The museum doesn't shy away from the industry's costs either, offshore accidents and environmental questions included, which makes it a more honest piece of civic storytelling than the celebratory building shape might suggest at first glance. It is a working account of an industry, not an advertisement for one.

Two towns, a short walk apart

What makes Stavanger worth more than a quick look is how little the two stories have crowded each other out. The old town's lanes are still lived in rather than preserved as a set piece, and the modern harbour, with its ferries and supply vessels serving the offshore rigs, sits close enough to walk to from streets that predate the industry by a hundred and fifty years. Few Norwegian towns show quite so clearly, in such a small area, how completely a single discovery can change a place's fortunes twice over.

Stavanger Cathedral, a short walk from both, adds a third layer that neither story quite accounts for: consecrated around 1125, it is the oldest cathedral in Norway to have kept its original medieval structure largely intact, which is a reminder that the town's fortunes have risen and fallen more than the herring-then-oil story alone suggests.

Before moving on

Cruises calling at Stavanger usually treat it as a gateway to the Boknafjord and the dramatic cliffs further inland, which is fair enough; the fjord scenery beyond the town is genuinely spectacular. But an hour or two in Stavanger itself, walking from the timber lanes to the harbour, tells a more particular story than the fjords do: one town, two industries, and the evidence of both still standing.

It is worth allowing that hour or two deliberately rather than treating the town purely as a place to disembark before the scenery starts. Stavanger's harbour, cathedral and old town lanes reward slow walking more than a rushed transfer ever will, and the fjord will still be there afterwards.