Ratingen

Ratingen started the continent's industrial revolution. In 1783 the merchant Johann Gottfried Brügelmann, having obtained — by paths best called adventurous — the jealously guarded secrets of Arkwright's English spinning machines, built beside the Anger brook the first mechanised factory on the European mainland, and named it, in frank homage to the original, Cromford. The elegant white mill and the master's Herrenhaus survive complete as the LVR industrial museum: water-frame spinning demonstrated on the ancient machines, the birth certificate of continental industry kept where it was signed.

The town beside the mill is far older and unexpectedly pretty: a medieval core within traceable walls, the Dumeklemmer legend — citizens allegedly pinching a saint's thumbs in the town gate earned Ratingen its odd nickname, worn with humour — the weighty Romanesque-Gothic St Peter and Paul, the Bürgerhaus gables around the market, and the moated Renaissance jewel Haus zum Haus in the meadows, now serving festive dinners behind its water ring.

Prosperity kept faith with beginnings: Ratingen today hosts international technology headquarters on Düsseldorf's border while guarding green luxuries — the Blaue See, a flooded quarry lake with fairy-tale stage summers, the Angertal's walks, and the vast Volkardey lakes for sails and herons. First factory, pinched thumbs, blue water: Ratingen industrialised Europe and kept its comforts intact.