Essen; Saturday, 11 January, 2020

Originally I’d booked the hotel at Heathrow as I was supposed to be going on a work trip, but that got cancelled a couple of weeks earlier. As the hotel was on a non-refundable booking – and I had some airline credit that needed to be used, I’d booked an early morning flight to Germany so that in the end I had a weekend away for just an extra €40 for the hotel in Essen. It did, though, mean getting a really early flight from Heathrow to make the weekend worthwhile and consequently I had to get up at 5am.

For some reason I had a really bad nights sleep and kept waking up every hour or so. In the end it turned out to be for the best as I realised at about 03:50 that the USB port I was charging my phone off of had died and my battery was at just 4%, so if I had had a better nights sleep there was every chance my phone would have died before my alarm call and I could easily have ended up missing the flight! Feeling knackered from the poor nights sleep I got up at just after 4, had a shower and then made my way over to Heathrow, arriving at the terminal just as they were opening the checkin desks and security.

My journey through the airport was spookily quiet, with very few people around. Clearly 7am on the second Saturday in January is not a popular time to travel. The flight itself was half empty, so we were all boarded early – pushed back 10 minutes early and consequently jumped quite a long way up the take-off slots so we were airborne at the same time that we should have started pushback, despite it being a long taxi to the other end of the runway. With a good tailwind we ended up landing at Dusseldorf 25 minutes early and with a very short taxi to the terminal and only hand luggage I was on the Sky Train to the train station at the same time as we were originally scheduled to land.

By the time I reached Essen it was only just after 10:15, so I popped my suitcase into a left luggage locker at the station and caught the tram further into the centre of town to go for a wander. My first stop of the morning was the very nice, if quite small, cathedral. I spent quite a bit of time looking round, mostly because the cathedral treasury museum which I wanted to look round didn’t open until 11.

After looking round the cathedral, and when it finally opened, the treasury I had a bit more of a wander around the city centre – though there isn’t that much of interest in the centre of the city – given it’s key location on the Ruhr and its industrial importance most of the city centre was levelled by allied bombing during WWII. From the city centre I hopped on the U-Bahn and travelled south a couple of stops to the Museum Folkwang to look round the large art collection that the museum houses.

From the Museum Folkwang I quickly popped back into the centre of town to grab a late lunch and then headed back out south to the area around the fair and the Grugapark – this large park houses the city’s botanical gardens, along with several other attractions, though they were all closed for the winter and most of the plants had died back to just stalks so it was more just the opportunity to have a long walk in a pleasant park.

I caught the U-Bahn back from the Grugapark to the city centre, stopping off to retrieve my luggage from the Hauptbahnhof lockers before heading over to my hotel for the night to checkin and freshen up. I then headed back out into the centre to have a quick dinner.

After dinner I caught the tram out from the city centre to Zollverein. Here a part of the city’s industrial heritage has been preserved in the form of the pit lift and some of the buildings of the Zollverein coal mine. The site is now a museum and entertainment complex which I was intending on visiting tomorrow, but I wanted to get a couple of pictures of the Bauhaus buildings floodlit at night.

From Zollverein I headed back into town, stopping off again at the Cathedral to take a few night-time shots there before finally making my way back to the hotel to turn in for a well-deserved sleep.