Every design for Willich

Willich is known well beyond the Lower Rhine for the Neersener Schlossfestspiele, the festival held at the castle in Neersen, and for a large business park where a number of international companies, many from the Far East, have their European or German headquarters. The town itself is young, formed in 1970 from the villages of Willich, Anrath, Schiefbahn and Neersen, though Anrath was first recorded back in 1010.

The Gedenkstein The Royal Engineers in Willich tells a chapter many locals still remember: for more than forty years British Army engineers were stationed here, until their camp closed in 1992. Elsewhere the town is calmer. The Konrad-Adenauer-Park and the Kurt-Schumacher-Park are for Sunday walks, the Alter Willicher Bahnhof recalls the railway age, and the Schiefbahner Bruch adds a patch of woodland to otherwise wide, flat farmland.

Coming home here means level fields stretching towards the Niers, the familiar names of the four villages on the road signs, and the telecom tower at Schiefbahn showing the way long before the first houses come into view.