Beringen | Belgium
What a sight! The long line of carefully built individual showers in the miners’ washroom appears to be never-ending. Here every man had his own cabin. The progressive features on the site are mainly due to the fact that the colliery was built relatively late – shortly after 1900. For this reason it ...
Blegny | Belgium
Les Gueules Noires - the black faces: That’s the way the Walloons called their coal buddies. Italians, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Russians, Turks and of course Belgians labored in teams to feed the insatiable blast furnaces around Liege with coal. At the closing in 1980 Blegny mine was the oldest ...
Gent | Belgium
The bale breaker, the beater and the rack all sound like instruments belonging to a torture chamber, but in reality they are part of the machines in an old mechanical cotton mill. The Museum of Industry in Ghent dedicates a whole storey to textile manufacture because cotton was the driving force ...
Marcinelle | Belgium
Two silent pithead winding gears tower over the redbrick gable of the Bois de Cazier colliery near Charleroi. The colliery has now ceased operations but in August 1956 it was the site of one of the most tragic accidents in European mining history; a disaster that killed a total of 262 workers. A ...
Alfeld (Leine) | Germany
Why is it that a boot-last factory in rural Lower Saxony becomes a turning point in modern architecture? The former warehouse of the Fagus Factory turns that question into an exciting story, displayed on five floors, and recounting various aspects that still shape our reception of architecture. This ...
Augsburg | Germany
Rattling looms, creative fashion laboratory, modern high-tech: tim, the young Augsburg Textile and Industrial Museum, which opened in January 2010, connects the rapid development of the local textile industry with an exciting trip into the history of fashion and clothing over the past two centuries. ...
Berlin | Germany
Lifeworld Ship”, “From Ballooning to the Berlin Airlift”, “Trains, Locomotives and People”: any technological developments that Berlin witnessed during the past 120 years are showcased in the capital's Deutsches Technikmuseum (German Museum of Technology). Greeting travellers from a distance there ...
Berlin | Germany
It is located in the middle of a residential area: the 75/76 forced labor camp in Berlin-Schöneweide. From June 1944, deported civilians from all over Europe lived here, as well as more than 400 Italian military internees and about 200 female concentration camp prisoners. Who were they, what did ...
Bitterfeld-Wolfen | Germany
Nowadays, the complexity of producing non-digital films is hard to imagine. A guided tour of the Bitterfeld-Wolfen Industry and Film Museum helps to change the focus. Visitors gain deep insights into the challenging temperatures and light conditions by inspecting the particular machines that ...
Bocholt | Germany
Whirring belts, rattling looms, the smell of oil and work: the Industrial Museum Textilwerk Bocholt replicates the activities in an early 20th century cotton mill. The reconstructed brick buildings follow the historical examples of the region: the boiler house and shed roofs, workshop and office, ...
Chemnitz | Germany
The framework: a listed factory building from around the turn of the 20th century. Inside: innovative products of Saxon industrial history, the major ones highlighted on a silver strip. The exhibits cover more than 200 years, from the beginning of industrialization to this day. There are, for ...
Delmenhorst | Germany
Twelve hours work in suffocating factory rooms followed by a meagre dinner in a house belonging to the company, and maybe a chat over the garden fence with the neighbour before going to bed. This was more or less the typical pattern of everyday life in the north German Wool Combing and Worsted ...
Dortmund | Germany
Angle towers and gables with battlements, artistically ornate staircases, an imposing boulevard of lime and plane trees against the background of a palatial redbrick façade! Was this once supposed to be a colliery? Indeed it was. The original owners consciously set out to build a magnificent ...
Duisburg | Germany
“Clean and tidy and ready to be fired up once more”. That may be so. But blast furnace no. 5 on the site of the disused Thyssen ironworks will stay for ever cold. Because it is right in the middle of the North Duisburg Landscape Park. This 200 hectare area is a clear example of how nature and ...
Essen | Germany
Zollverein is the meeting place for past, present and future. The past is explored by the "Heritage Trail", bringing to life the history and technology of what was once Europe's largest coal mine. What was it like when the rhythm of gigantic machines and conveyor belts determined the lives of 5,000 ...
Euskirchen | Germany
Dust hangs in the air. It smells of oil and wool. Coffee mugs stand forgotten amongst the machines. Pieces of scribbled note paper are lying untidily around. In the factory owner’s office stands a safe riddled with bullet holes from the Second World War and files of yellowed paper. Suddenly the ...
Friedrichshafen | Germany
'Flying cigars', 'luxury liners of the air', 'giants of the skies': ever since the invention of airships they have sparked people's imagination. People are also the main focus of the Zeppelin Museum at Friedrichshafen. Who was this Count Ferdinand Zeppelin sticking against all odds with the idea of ...
Furtwangen | Germany
The same show is repeated every hour on the hour. A striking mechanism pushes a little wooden bird into position and simultaneously raises two small bellows that emit air through two lip pipes: "Cuckoo!" For 300 years the people in the German Black Forest delivered handmade cuckoo clocks all over ...
Geeste | Germany
The Mammut is still alive, at least at the Emsland Moorland Museum in Geeste. "Mammut" is the name of a massive 30-ton steam plough made by Ottomeyer in the 1940s. The only one of its kind in the world, it ploughed the ground up to two metres deep and was pulled by four locomobiles, two of which ...
Goslar | Germany
Narrow, crudely hewed out mining galleries: damp rock: glittering coloured crystal minerals. Suddenly the seemingly enchanted underground kingdom springs to life. Rushing water: a mighty scoop wheel creaks into action: above it rises the remarkably genuine sound of crackling fire and bursting rock. ...