Ruhr Museum

The Ruhr Museum at Zollverein is the most ambitious attempt to understand and present the history of the Ruhr region — Europe's largest industrial conurbation — in all its complexity. The permanent exhibition covers geology, archaeology, natural history, and 200 years of industrial, social, and cultural history, moving from the coal seams deep underground to the present-day transformation of the region.

The building is as important as the content: the former coal washing plant retains its original industrial structure, and the exhibition design by Heinrich Böll and Hans Schreiber uses the space to create a journey through time that begins in the geological deep past and ends in the present. The escalators that carry visitors down through the coal-dusted structure are one of the great museum entrance sequences in Germany.

things to do museum
A story
The Ruhr Museum occupies the former coal washing plant at Zollverein — the building where raw coal arrived from the shaft and was sorted, cleaned, and sized. During conversion to a museum, workers discovered that decades of coal dust had settled into every surface and crevice of the structure. Rather than clean it, the architects preserved it, and the dark, coal-stained interior now frames the exhibition as a kind of archaeological site.

Other places in Things to Do in Essen