Biography | Ulf Widerström — Two Years Inside the Roads Board House on Hantverkargatan

The wartime job was not a contractor's yard. It was a state office on Kungsholmen.

After three years at Vattenbyggnadsbyrån, Widerström joined Kungliga Väg- och vattenbyggnadsstyrelsen in 1940 and stayed until 1942.

Vem är det 1981 records those dates in the same compressed line as the KTH diploma.

The board was Sweden's central roads-and-water works authority, later folded into what became Vägverket and then Trafikverket.

Its official rooms sat in Ämbetshuset at Hantverkargatan 29, the 1926 office block Axel Lindegren designed for several government boards at once.

Building-board papers from the mid-1940s show the authority overflowing that house into rented floors nearby. The address that still stands is this one.

He left the board in 1942 for AB Skånska Cementgjuteriet, first as an avdelningschef, a departmental head.

The contractor had been founded in 1887 beside the Limhamn cement works. By 1942 its head office had already been in Stockholm for a generation.

The jump matters because it is the last public employer before the firm that would take his name in the history tables.

Ämbetshuset later housed Länsstyrelsen. Since 2018 the same brick block has been Anna Whitlocks gymnasium.

A visitor now finds a school entrance, not a works-board brass plate. The facade on Hantverkargatan is still Lindegren's.

Photo: Holger Ellgaard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons