For seventy years this was an airport; now it's the largest open space in the city, and you can walk down the middle of a runway. Tempelhofer Feld is the airfield Berliners voted to keep empty — no apartments, no shopping, just the apron, the runways and a horizon you'd otherwise have to leave town to find.
Start at the Tempelhof terminal, the curving stone kilometre the Nazis built to intimidate, and walk out onto the tarmac. The runway markings are still there; so, in the ground, is the history of the 1948–49 airlift that flew West Berlin its food and coal. Follow a runway into the open and, somewhere in the middle, stop — cyclists and kite-buggies and a flat, far skyline, and nothing else for a kilometre.
Skirt the fenced grassland left wild for skylarks (you'll hear them in spring), pass the community gardens at the Schillerkiez edge, and leave the field for Neukölln and the U8 at Boddinstraße. The sudden return of buildings and noise is the whole point of where you've just been.
