Construction ran under royal decree from 1868 until the harbour opened officially in 1874, with rail links laid west to Varde and east to Fredericia, the junction that connected it to the rest of the country. The town came next, and it came drawn. In 1870 a chartered surveyor named H. Wilkens set out the streets as a rectangular grid, placing the market square, Torvet, exactly midway between harbour and railway station — the two things the place existed to join. The older parts of Esbjerg still read like a chessboard, long wide streets meeting at right angles, which gives the city a plainness that surprises visitors expecting Danish quaintness. In 1893 Esbjerg became a municipality of its own, at first as Esbjerg Ladeplads, and in 1899 it was granted the status and privileges of a market town.

The growth curve is startling even now. From roughly 400 residents at the start of the 1870s the town reached 1,529 by 1880 and 4,211 by 1890. By 1901 it held some 13,000 people, already larger than Varde and Ribe, the ancient towns nearby that had watched it appear. By the end of the 1950s it had nearly 60,000 inhabitants and was Denmark's fifth-largest city; by 1970, around 70,000. Then the curve flattened. The population peaked at 73,422 in 1998 and has hovered close to that since, standing at 71,554 at the start of 2025. A city built in a hurry eventually stops being in a hurry.

Esbjerg was once Denmark's principal fishing port, but the harbour did far more than land fish. In 1895 nine local dairies founded a butter-packaging plant, Dansk Andels Smørpakkeri, which employed around 150 people packing and dispatching butter to the London market and eventually handled produce from 140 dairies across Jutland; it later expanded into egg export as Dansk Andels Ægeksport. The co-operative slaughterhouse Esbjerg Andels-Slagteri, founded in 1887, became Denmark's sixth largest by 1962, later merged into Vestjyske Slagterier and was acquired by Danish Crown in 2001. For a long while, whatever Danish farms produced left the country through here. Passengers left too: a ferry ran from Esbjerg to Harwich in England from 1875 until the crossings ended in September 2014, after 139 years.

When oil and gas came out of the Danish North Sea in the early 1970s, Esbjerg became the shore base, and it has been reinventing itself on offshore work ever since. The port now handles around 65 per cent of all Danish wind turbines and ships components to British wind farms as well. In June 2013 it opened the Østhavn, an eastern harbour covering some 650,000 square metres, specifically to take the scale of modern turbine blades and nacelles. Stand at the quay and the componentry is genuinely hard to process — single blades longer than the fishing boats that used to fill this basin, stacked in rows, waiting for a heavy-lift vessel.

West of the city, above Sædding Beach, four seated white figures nine metres tall stare out at the North Sea. Men at Sea — Mennesket ved Havet — was designed by Svend Wiig Hansen and installed on 28 October 1995 to mark the municipality's centenary the year before. Blank-faced and enormous, the figures are the first thing arriving ships see, and the last thing departing ones do. The city behind them has its own set of landmarks: the water tower of 1897, which Christian Hjerrild Clausen modelled on the medieval Nassauer Haus in Nuremberg and which still opens its platform to anyone willing to climb; the old courthouse of 1892 by Hans Christian Amberg, red brick with stepped gables and a thirty-metre tower, built to look like a castle when the town had barely four thousand people and now used for weddings and the tourist office; and the Esbjerg Performing Arts Centre of 1997, designed by Jan Utzon with his father Jørn, sharing a complex with the art museum in the city park by the harbour.