Lippstadt

Lippstadt lights the world's roads. The town is the home of Hella, the automotive lighting giant grown from a nineteenth-century lamp workshop into a global corporation — headlamps and electronics from this Westphalian mid-town gleam on cars of every continent, and the company's presence has made Lippstadt a capital of light in the most literal industrial sense, now with a university campus to match.

It was always a planned success: founded in 1185 by Bernhard II zur Lippe, Lippstadt counts as Westphalia's oldest founded town — a deliberate grid by the river rather than an accident of growth — and for over four centuries it lived a constitutional curiosity, ruled jointly as a condominium by Lippe and Brandenburg-Prussia, two sovereigns sharing one town in bureaucratic marriage. Water shaped its charm: the Lippe's arms braid through the centre, earning the postcard title of a Westphalian Venice, best confirmed by boat along the green channels.

The stone witnesses stand close together: the great Marienkirche, an early-Gothic hall of Westphalian nobility; the haunting ruin of the Stiftskirche's west facade in its rose garden; gabled bourgeois houses on the long market. Around town, the Lippe meadows and the spa quarter of Bad Waldliesborn add slow pleasures to the bright industry. Founded on purpose, governed in duplicate, illuminated for export — Lippstadt's beams travel further than its modesty admits.