Today was my last full day in Essen. It snowed and made pretty.
Hostess came back from work to discover I’d successfully made both soup and carnage, and after a yummy lunch we set off to the Zollverein coal mine to do some (more!) culture. She’ has’s had tickets to visit the Zollverein coal mine for a while and was thrilled to have someone with whom she could use them.
Once the biggest coal mine in the world, Zollverein eventually suffered the same fate as its neighbours and was the last functioning coal mine in Essen when it stopped operations just before Christmas in 1986, as most of the coal supplies available to it had been exhausted. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia immediately bought the site from its operator and made plans to turn it into a heritage site. The adjacent coking plant closed in 1993 and became a heritage site in 2000 and now houses the Red Dot Museum.
In 2001, the UN declared the site a World Heritage Site.
The site’s iconic winding tower sits atop Shaft 12, the last shaft on the site to be sunk and which opened in 1932. It is considered both an architectural and technical masterpiece and is pretty enough to have earned itself a reputation as “most beautiful colliery in the world” following the site’s transformation into a heritage site.
The site, and the museum within it, is absolutely vast and we must have spent nearly four hours there without having seen everything. That a museum managed to keep me entertained for that long is testament to its Bauhaus splendour. It’s also incredibly soothing; I find comfort in symmetry on such a huge scale.
There’s a permanent exhibition spread across a few floors, an exhibition of images, sounds, and smells, and a temporary exhbition which is, at the moment, about the renaturation of the Emscher and the occupation of the Ruhr area between 1923 and 1925.
After our many hours of trundling, I forced Hostess to witness first-hand my decision-making process and eventually managed to leave a shop with a pair of gloves. I’m not sure they’re the best gloves I could’ve had, but yesterday’s experiencing of the cold and wet let me to realise that the gloves I have with me are inadequate and will almost certainly fail to keep my hands toasty as I move further north.
I made food in the evening and, after quite a lot of wine, decided it best to do my packing in the morning.
