Every design for Lempäälä

It was a parish priest from Lempäälä, Erik Edner, who put the case for founding Tampere before the Swedish Diet, so this municipality just south of the city can fairly claim a hand in its bigger neighbour's birth. Lempäälä itself grew out of a medieval parish that once belonged to Greater Pirkkala. Its stone Church of St Birgitta, raised in the early sixteenth century to replace a wooden one, still stands over the church village of Lempoinen, and the canal through the centre was dug as famine-relief work in the late 1860s to join the lakes of the Kokemäenjoki water system.

Davidin kapinan muistolaatta recalls the moment Lempäälä first appears in the records as a parish of its own, in a settlement over David's rebellion drawn up at Kuokkala. Kuokkalan museoraitti keeps small museums on the same ground, and Sakkola-museo remembers the evacuees from Sakkola who were resettled here after the Second World War. Kelho and Sotavalta, manors battered when the Civil War front stalled here, are farmed to this day.

On the map the canal is a thin blue thread through the middle of town, with the railway running past the string of villages that grew up along it.