Every design for Recklinghausen

Recklinghausen sits on the very northern rim of the Ruhr, the point where the industry of the south gives way to the wide fields and farms of the Münsterland.

The town centre crowns a low ridge of loess, curved like a half-circle open to the south, and from it the land slopes down towards the Emscher valley and its southern districts. The highest natural point is the Fritzberg in the east, but the hill everyone knows is the Mollbeckberg, a man-made heap in the north-west that locals simply call the Rodelberg, the sledging hill. Coal mining reached the town in the nineteenth century and drove its growth, yet the old core is far older: a Carolingian royal estate, a town charter in the thirteenth century and the gates whose names survive in the Lohtor, the Steintor and the Viehtor. Today Recklinghausen is a town for shopping and services, home to the Ruhr Festival and to the Ikonen-Museum, the largest museum of icons outside the Orthodox world.

If you grew up here, you know the rush down the Rodelberg in winter and the walk back through the old gates. The map holds both.