Eindhoven

Eindhoven was switched on in 1891, when the Philips family began making light bulbs in a small factory — and the company grew a village into the Netherlands' fifth city, then filled it with laboratories whose descendants still make the region Europe's densest patent landscape. The inheritance is everywhere: PSV, the football pride, began as the Philips Sports Club; the Evoluon's flying saucer was the company's gift of a science centre; and Strijp-S, the once-secret factory campus, is now the creative quarter where the city's second act happens. That act is design: the Design Academy made Eindhoven the discipline's world capital-in-training, Dutch Design Week each October is Europe's largest design event, and the GLOW festival turns the whole city into a light installation — the bulb-makers' town painting with its founding product.

Musical Eindhoven answers industry with a proper establishment: the Muziekgebouw concert hall — bearing Frits Philips's name, the patriarch having endowed the city's musical life — hosts the region's symphonic seasons and the philharmonie zuidnederland, while the concert record's register of choirs, churches and community music-making describes the broad base beneath. Light bulbs, football, design and a concert hall named for the boss: Eindhoven is the company town that outgrew the company — brightly.