Every design for Herford

Herford grew up around a ford in the narrow Werre, which the town was founded to guard in 789, and that river still meets the Aa in the heart of town. Around it lies the gently rolling Ravensberg country between the Wiehen Hills and the Teutoburg Forest: farmland cut by little valleys, with woods only on the higher ground, rising to the Dornberg at the town's highest point.

For anyone from here, Herford is a walk through old streets lined with houses that have stood for centuries: the Remensniderhaus with its late Gothic timber frame, the Wulferthaus with its brick Renaissance gable, the Neustädter Rathaus. It is also the abbey town where Matilda grew up and met Henry the Fowler, later king of Germany, and a Hanseatic town that answered to no one but the emperor until Brandenburg-Prussia took it over.

And it is the Marta Herford, a museum for contemporary art and design, standing in the same town as Sankt Jakobi, a late Gothic hall church from 1330 that still marks the old Radewig quarter.