On metropolitan trails.

Henrichshütte Ironworks, Hattingen, Photo: RTG / Joachim Schumacher

Most people think that the history of the Ruhr region begins with the invention of the steam engine and the technological revolutions of the 19th century. Outside historical perspectives – one might even say, inside perspectives too – are often overlaid by the legacies of the age of steel and coal. Colliery towers, blast furnaces, the “cathedrals of industrial heritage” are massive landmarks which often affect the way we view the region’s history. 

We do not have to go back to the “Vogelheim blade” of the Stone Age (around 280.000 years old) to grasp that the landscape between the Rivers Ruhr, Emscher and Lippe was an ancient human settlement area. Evidence of continual human settlement can be found everywhere: archaic, Frankish/Saxon, mediaeval, even from the early modern age. 

But the one thing which has been missing throughout history is an overriding centre, a core point of secular or ecclesiastical power. The reason for this was that the region was always a borderland, a transit land, a land of

pilgrims, trading routes and crusading armies from the Romans to the German hordes, from Franconia and Saxony, a land of colonising Cistercian and Benedictine missionaries in the early mediaeval age, of marauding mercenaries during the 30 Years War, all the way to Napoleon’s troops at the turn of the 19th century. The hilly region between the Ruhr and Lippe was crossed by the rumbling wagons of mediaeval traders on the Hellweg trading route, a continuous road from Bruges in Flanders to Novgorod in Russia. Nowadays it is packed with columns of heavy goods vehicles whose timetables are dictated by European logistics.

The Capital of Culture programme has made this special feature its own, and invites people to find out more about the past, present and future of this dynamic region by means of its “passages”. Four passages, each of which running from west to east, will reflect its geographical and historical topography.