Every design for Ratingen

At the Herrenhaus Cromford, Ratingen's industrial story has an unexpectedly graceful setting. The town's first factories opened in 1783, and in Cromford a mechanical spinning mill took shape that grew into the Textilfabrik Cromford, now part of the Rheinisches Industriemuseum. Yet the history here runs much deeper. Ratingen was settled before 849, appears in early records as Hratuga, and received its town rights in 1276 from the counts of Berg, who built it up as a fortified counterweight to the Archbishop of Cologne. It was one of four towns in Berg that boomed at the end of the Middle Ages, before the Thirty Years' War slowed it down, and it passed to Prussia in 1815.

For people who grew up here, Ratingen is a town of short distances and familiar corners: the walk along the Anger, the woods of the Hinkesforst, the Silbersee where Ice Age hand axes once came to light, and the old streets around the Haus zum Haus. It sits on a Rhine terrace about 12 km north-east of Düsseldorf, and it came through the Second World War with relatively little damage.

Big international companies have their offices here now, yet coming back still feels like returning to a small town you know by heart.