Every design for Rostock

Pass under the Kröpeliner Tor and you step into a city that has traded across the Baltic for eight centuries. Polabian Slavs first settled here at a fork of the Warnow and called it Roztoc. The Danish king Valdemar I burned the place in 1161, German traders settled it afterwards, and in 1218 Rostock was granted Lübeck law. It joined the Hanseatic League in 1283 and grew as three separate towns, each around its own market and church, before they merged into one.

It is hard to walk the old streets without feeling the weight of what came after. The decline of the Hanse, the Thirty Years' War and the great fire of 1677 cut the population to a third; aircraft factories in the twentieth century made the city a wartime target; and in East German times it became the country's most important port. The university, founded in 1419, is the oldest in the Baltic region and today the city's largest employer.

Anyone who grew up here can trace that history on the map: the Kuhtor, the Kloster zum Heiligen Kreuz, the river widening towards Warnemünde and the open sea.