For those following the blog, apologies for the lack of updates recently. I have been enjoying some annual leave as well as some travel for work but I am back and ready to hit the road, rail, footpaths and trails in and around Bonn.
Douglas Adams once wrote that no-one ever uses 'as pretty as an airport' as a metaphor and for good reason. Similarly, I wasn't expecting an old steel mill to be 'pretty'. And it wasn't but there was a stunning, brutal beauty to the place. Firstly the scale is phenomenal. Herr Thyssen began making steel here in 1901 and it seems that he spent the next 85 years perfecting the process and increasing scale with each new blast furnace created.
Your can climb to the top of one of the remaining blast furnaces. With typical German efficiency, each set of stairs is marked with its height above the ground, accurate to the centimeter. I stopped reading the heights once I saw '65.45m'; those of you who are aware of my legendary fear for heights would appreciate my thought process here. However, the view from the top of the tower is breath taking!
This area was one of the main steel making powerhouses for Germany and the level of industrialization surrounding the park is still massive. I walked the 9km from the railway station to the park, hoping to see some beautiful buildings and enjoy the scenery. However, I had forgotten what a pounding this region took from Allied bombing 70 or so years ago. As such, Duisburg has a couple of churches and a beautiful Rathaus or Town Hall remaining but the rest of the city seems to have been built in the last 60 years or so. And these new buildings are functional to the point of being ugly.
But back to Landschaftspark. When you walk in to the park, you follow the old railway lines, now converted to trails for pedestrians and bicycles. Beside the trails remains a functioning railway line and it was quite apropos to be passed by a train weighed down with rolls of steel. Within the park, some of the tracks remain in place but they are now overgrown and provide a nice counterpoint to the train rattling and squeaking past. As you round the corner and head toward the steel mills, it becomes apparent that there were multiple rail lines; coal cars were directed to massive coal bunkers and the railcars were automatically unloaded of their black cargo. Coal was the life blood of the steel making process; the outrageous heat required to smelt the steel required massive amounts of coal. Then, the pig iron was loaded on to separate trains and rolled out on separate tracks.
Following the original coal rails, the bridges over the bunkers remain and have been converted to walking trails so you can walk directly over the coal bunkers and observe exactly how the cars were unloaded. It was from here that I walked over to the blast furnace and climbed to the top of the tower for the amazing views shown above.
But it is at the back of the furnace that you can see what all the fuss was about.
In these images you can see where the iron was drawn off at the base of the furnace and run directly into the channels shown in the picture. Note the tools for taking samples and the like.
Imagine the heat in this area! The walls were only partially bricked, allowing fresh air to wash through but even so. The furnace temperatures got to 2000 degrees C and the steel here is so hot that it flows down these channels to form the ingots. The workers looking at the original ingots thought they looked a little like a pig, hence the name 'pig iron'.
There is a large gasometer here as well, some 15m high and it must be 50m or more in diameter. Originally, this was used to collect gases that came off the steel making process; these gases were then burnt to create electricity that then powered various parts of the plant and surrounding village. Cleverly, this has been converted to a diving tank, replete with sunken ship, plane and a reef. Sadly only divers with reservations could climb up so I have to rely on the website to update you here.
Other buildings have been transformed into offices and the power plant has been opened up to become a concert hall or exhibition space. Exterior buildings have been opened up for a massive series of climbing walls of various levels of challenge.
Kids can try some of the easier ones and enjoy a cool slide that is shaped like one of the massive return tubes in the blast furnace itself. It is completely sealed (except of the two ends, obviously) but that still didn't stop the squeals of delight (or terror?) filling the air.
It's an amazing transformation. Even with the trees softening the exterior of the buildings, it is difficult to make these buildings beautiful. But the effect is most impressive. Steel is obviously a heavy industry so the equipment needed to manufacture steel is correspondingly heavy to the point of appearing over engineered. Everything is designed on a monumental scale in terms of size and structure. Buildings like these are testament to mankind's ingenuity. Walking and clambering around the site, it is difficult to imagine how such a complex yet massive creation could have been conceived, let alone built and maintained. Maybe its a good thing that a campus of buildings like this is kept and transformed in to such a variety of uses; museums, gardens, concert halls, recreational diving, restaurants and the like. But what makes the site work is the open space around the buildings; the slow reveal as you follow the old train lines to the site unveils the buildings slowly and majestically. The quietness of the location is in stark contrast to the maelstrom of noise that must have existed during the days of production.
There is a brutal beauty here. The enormity of the site and it's buildings conspire to create a sense of wonder and amazement. A great place to visit. Check out the website http://www.landschaftspark.de/startseite. For those who don't speak German, click the English flag at the top of the page for a great translation.
