Tseh Space, Pochaina, Vspyshka: A Route for Youth

In 2023, Nizhny Novgorod was awarded the status of the Youth Capital of Russia, so we have prepared a convenient route around Nizhny Novgorod for everyone who considers themselves to be in the «youth» category and just loves active recreation and is interested in contemporary culture. The route is especially relevant at the beginning of the summer travel season and, most importantly, the student holidays.

We suggest starting with a place popular with young people and tourists, which has recently become the focus of attention. This is an alley where works by various artists from Nizhny Novgorod and other cities have appeared spontaneously over the past five years. This is a real «patchwork» of street art, and cool background for photos and selfies. Don't miss the unique «Ikea Museum» by artist Nikita Chekhov.

You should stop by for coffee and a couple of hot crumpets (only 20 rubles each!) in a stylish Vspyshka crumpet shop next to the alley. In addition to the photogenic interior and affordable snacks, you can regularly find small exhibitions of local artists. The shop's team organizes them on their own initiative.

Through the main square of the city, past the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, we suggest going to Verkhne-Volzhskaya embankment. Visit one of the most stylish buildings in the city, the House of the Architect, where you can find one of the regular forward-looking exhibitions related to design and architecture, take a couple of photos in the interior, grab a coffee at the Architect coffee shop, and sit in a coworking space on the third floor right by the panoramic window overlooking the Volga River and the Chkalov stairs.

Go straight down from the Architect's House to the Alexandrovsky Garden. In the upper part of it, you can find an unusual outdoor Park Bistro with coffee, lemonades and hearty lunches. You can relax there on the sun beds overlooking the garden. On a summer evening, you can not only enjoy the walk and views here, but also see the show of the «Capital of Sunsets» program. Every weekend, concerts of both academic music and popular performers from all over the country take place on the Rakushka («The Shell») stage, reconstructed for the 800th anniversary of the city. 

Moving further along the Volga, we recommend walking or riding an electric scooter to the restored Referee’s Tower on the Grebnoy channel. There is an atmosphere of active Nizhny Novgorod here — roller skates, skateboards and bicycles ride along the paths, people relax and chat on benches overlooking the Grebnoy channel and eat noodles from the local street food «Sovok» in the former referee’s tower. 

To continue the route and go up again, we recommend taking an electric scooter or walking up, passing Krasnaya Sloboda along the Kazansky Slope. The ascent will take you straight to the Ferris wheel, which, for example, has a special booth for filming music videos. And down below, to the left of the ticket office, you can place an order with the robot (!) Dunyasha and, while the coffee is brewing, listen to music with her and guess a couple of riddles.

Let’s go from the Ferris wheel directly to Bolshaya Pecherskaya street. Here, a retro tram ride can become a separate tourist adventure, during which an audio guide will tell you about all the significant places along the route. We suggest going to the Rechnoye Uchilische bus stop, which is only an eight-minute walk from the former Nizhpoligraf building (where, by the way, the Harry Potter was published for the whole Russia in the noughties). Across the courtyard from Kovalikhinskaya street, we enter the multimedia art space TSEKH*, where multimedia exhibitions from Nizhny Novgorod masters of light and audiovisual art Dreamlaser are held.

Just five minutes away from the Nizhpoligraf on Oktyabrskaya street, you can find a very aesthetic space in a small estate with a garden in the city center. This is the Art Nouveau house of Lelkov. The project was created by the local upscale and vintage brand Nechego_nadet. It unites several vintage enthusiasts of the city. Here we recommend buying yourself something to remember your trip to Nizhny Novgorod: a hat, interesting shoes, Soviet porcelain or a vintage Armani jacket; the prices here don't bite too much, and the breadth is widest.

We will continue walking along the tram tracks on Oktyabrskaya and come to one of the main youth spots — the renovated city garden near the Salyut burger joint. A weekend program of festivals, markets, DJ sets and evening outdoor concerts is planned here for the whole summer. A flea market spontaneously forms here on Sunday mornings, where you can find vintage souvenirs from Nizhny Novgorod scavengers: vinyl records, metal badges and porcelain figurines in memory of a trip to the sunset capital.

Oktyabrskaya street flows into Dobrolyubova street, and we suggest turning onto Pochainsky boulevard at this point. It's great to relax on a swing overlooking the Kremlin, and just to stroll along the way to the newly growing cluster at 17 Pochainskaya street, which now unites several youth clubs, trendy bars, dance schools, and also includes the greenhouse space of the Parnik floral studio and the Shtab-Kvartira cultural space. We have collected for you the best youth attracting places that are convenient to combine into a single route, but there are still a lot of places in the city that you definitely should visit!