Leppävaara

There is evidence of residence in Leppävaara already in the Stone Age. There is a burial pile from the Bronze Age in the Leppävaara sports park, near the exercise path leading to Karakallio. The medieval village hill of Konungsböle is located near the golf practice ground on Säterinniitty at the end of Leppävaarantie.

The Alberga manor was founded in the area in the 1620. The Leppävaara manor is also located in the area, and the Kilo manor is located nearby. The oldest surviving building in Leppävaara is the Gransinmäki inn built in the 1830s, located on Vanha Maantie. The best known and most historically significant build is the new main building of the Alberga manor, known as "Sokerilinna" ("the sugar castle"), built in 1874 for the sugar manufacturer Feodor Kiseleff the younger.[1]

After the railway line from Helsinki to Turku was completed in 1903 Leppävaara began to develop as a manor neighbourhood. The villa known as Ylänne was built in Leppävaara. The bulk of the settlement was on the northern side of the railway and the southern side remained mostly in agricultural use. During World War I, Krepost Sveaborg, a fortification system of trenches and artillery batteries defending Helsinki was built, passing through Leppävaara. Though some of them are destroyed, there are still a lot of trenches and bunkers in the area, mainly in Vallikallio and Mäkkylänmetsä.

Leppävaara was formed as a community in 1921 and it remained such until all such ones at the beginning of 1956 were abolished. In the early 1960s as well as the separating also of Leppävaara, Tapiola from Espoo was designed as a town but the plans were rejected when Espoo at the beginning of 1963 was formed on the whole as a town.

In Eliel Saarinen's 1915 "Suur-Helsinki" plan the architect proposed considerably large scale buildings around the Leppävaara railway station. Until the late 1950s inhabitation of Leppävaara only consisted of small detached houses. The first modern apartment building was built in 1958 in Puustellinmäki at Postipuuntie 5. A total of 25 new apartment buildings were built in Puustellinmäki and Vallikallio, until the new construction in the entire area was forbidden in 1964.[1]

The Leppävaara area remained mostly unbuilt until the 1980s, when urban development began on the area north of the railway line. The area on the southern side of the railway however stayed in agricultural use until the 2000s, but is now a very urban neighbourhood. The planning of the area was slowed especially by the disagreements between the municipalities of Helsinki and Espoo as a large part of the area was for a long time in the possession of the city of Helsinki even though it was located inside the borders of Espoo.

Maxi-Market, the first hypermarket in Finland, was built in Leppävaara by Rake Oy and Osuusliike Elanto and was opened on November 4, 1971. The building was designed by Toivo Korhonen architect office and it was 130 metres long, 80 metres wide and had a total floor area of 15 800 square meters. The building was demolished in 2003 to make space for the new Sello shopping centre. Maxi received new premises at first phase of the Sello shopping centre opposite the K-Citymarket store, where it served for a year until it was replaced by HOK-Elanto's Prisma store after Elanto and HOK had fused. The second phase of Sello, containing most of the specialist stores in the shopping centre, was built in September 2005.

New apartment buildings were built in Perkkaa in the 1970s and in northern Leppävaara in the 1980s. Southern Leppävaara only started developing in the late 1990s around the site of the old Maxi hypermarket. Before this, the southern side of the railway tracks only contained the Maxi hypermarket, a few detached houses and a large amount of farmland. Zoning of the area was hindered by disagreement between municipalities, as a large part of the area was actually owned by the city of Helsinki despite being located in Espoo. Southern Leppävaara has been built fairly rapidly and has developed into an urban central area in a short time. Today most of the apartments in the entire district are located in apartment buildings.[2][3]

The Vermo race track was built in eastern Leppävaara, right next to the border to Helsinki, in 1977. The Leppävaara church was built in northern Leppävaara in 1979.

In the 2000s large office blocks and high-rise buildings have been built in southern Leppävaara, such as the Panorama Tower (2008) and Sellonhuippu (2011). The 21-story-high Leppävaara tower residential building was built to the northern side of the railway track in 2010.