Industrial Heritage

The clay pits of Terhagen in Belgium are part of a vast extraction area along the Rupel River, where clay was mined on an industrial scale throughout the 20th century for brickworks.

In northern Saarland, near the French border, these buildings transport you back to the Prussian mining era.

Along the Moselle lie the silent remnants of a railway bridge that was once of great strategic importance. The bridge was part of the dense railway network that, from the late 19th century, connected Germany’s industrial regions.

For the construction of the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, Gustave Eiffel had to source 7,000 tons of iron, iron he found near Nancy in the French region of Lorraine.

When the Swedish mining company LKAB decided in 1903 to build an electric tram line in the young mining town of Kiruna, it wasn’t a luxury or a novelty. It was a pure necessity.

In the early twentieth century, Ghent, Belgium, made a massive switch to electric power for trams, street lighting, and harbour cranes. To meet the growing demand, the city commissioned the construction of coal-fired power stations.

In a border village near the German–French frontier lies a slumbering industrial giant where, since the second half of the nineteenth century, coal was extracted on a massive scale.

During the heyday of coal mining, cable winches were standard equipment in every coal mine. Such a winch was used, for example, to install the steel elevator cables.

Clay pits had, from the end of the nineteenth century, taken over more than half of the territory of the hamlet of Terhagen in Belgium. After excavation, nature gradually reclaimed its space.

In the second half of the 19th century, iron ore from Lorraine and Luxembourg appeared to be on the decline. When pig iron was converted into steel using the Bessemer process, the result was far too brittle.