Every design for Mulhouse

Rows of locomotives fill the Cité du train, Europe's largest railway museum, a fitting monument in a city where André Koechlin began building railway equipment in 1842. That industrial story started with the textile printing works founded in 1746, which made Mulhouse one of Europe's first industrial centres and earned it the nickname "the French Manchester". Before that it was something stranger still: a free Calvinist city-republic associated with the Swiss Confederation, whose citizens voted to join France only in 1798.

Walking through Mulhouse stirs a quiet pride in work and invention. The Musée National de l'Automobile - Collection Schlumpf holds the largest car museum in Europe, the Musée de l'Impression sur Étoffes keeps the printed fabrics that made the city rich, and the Temple Saint-Étienne, the tallest Protestant church in France, rises over the old centre, where carnival and painted façades carry older traditions on. The Tour du Bollwerk, the tower that survived from the old bastion, gave the city one of its nicknames.

On the map, anyone raised here can follow the streets from the Temple Saint-Étienne out to the Parc Salvator, the route of a childhood in a city of makers.