Herne Audio Tours

Herne was a small agricultural settlement, barely a village, until coal mining started in 1860. Within thirty years the population had multiplied twentyfold, driven by shafts sinking into the thick seams of the Ruhr. The Rhine-Herne Canal cut through in 1914, connecting the city to the port system. By the mid-twentieth century, Herne was a dense industrial city of steel workers, miners, and their families, compressed between Bochum to the south and Gelsenkirchen to the north. Then the mines closed, the steelworks closed, and the city spent the late twentieth century working out what to be next.

Schloss Strunkede in the Baukau district is a moated castle first documented in the thirteenth century, now a local history museum surrounded by a park.

It survives as a reminder that Herne had a pre-industrial identity, however briefly remembered. The Rhine-Herne Canal still carries significant freight traffic, its banks used by cyclists and walkers on the industrial towpaths that were converted as part of the Ruhr's post-mining regeneration. Herne was known in the postwar years as 'Die Goldene Stadt,' the Golden City, because it escaped the worst bombing of the war relatively intact.