There are many benefits to spending time in the park, but perhaps few of them have a Hackaday angle. There’s a park in Germany you might want to make an exception for, and it lies in the Ruhrpott city of Duisburg.

I was lucky enough last month to join a friend as she toured Germany for the first time with a caravan. It’s a large country with many beautiful places, so her choice might seem unexpected at first sight. The Ruhrpott, or Ruhr area, is a loose conurbation of industrial cities that loosely follows the river Ruhr on its trip to the Rhine on the western edge of the country. It’s close to  deposits of coal and iron ore, so just like similar areas in other countries, it became a centre for heavy industry. Today that continues, but as you might expect it’s also dotted with the remains of former industries. It’s one of those which is our subject for today, and it offers a very unusual opportunity.

Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord is a forest park on the northern side of the city of Duisburg. But of course that’s not the whole story, because until 1985 it was the site of the Thyssen ironworks. In rehabilitating the site they chose to keep the main structures of the ironworks intact as they reclaimed the surrounding polluted industrial land, so today it may be one of the few places in the world where you can free of charge get up-close and personal with a fully-intact and preserved blast furnace. The site has three of them remaining along with their associated ore and gas processing plants, and the largest and newest, blast furnace number 5, is a structure you can climb to its top. If you’ve ever been curious about iron smelting, this is the place to come. Continue reading “Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord” →