Every design for Hengelo

Did you know Hengelo was never granted city rights? It was still a village of farms and labourers' cottages when the Stork family arrived with a machine-parts factory, and it grew into a city anyway, on the strength of metal, electrical engineering and salt.

There is a particular feeling to the place, of a town that rebuilt itself. Bombed during the Second World War for its strategic industry, its centre was largely destroyed, and planners reshaped it as a modern city, with garden-city neighbourhoods and a town hall whose tower nods to Siena and Florence. The industrial past is kept alive at the Oyfo Techniekmuseum and Museum Hengelo, alongside the Piet Blom Museum and the Museum Electro-Radio-Nostalgie, and the park at Bataafse Kamp offers green space in the middle of town.

Hengelo still answers to its old nickname, metaalstad. Wear the Oyfo Techniekmuseum on the map and you wear a town that made its living with its hands and still takes pride in it.