Tilburg

Tilburg wove its fortune and laughs about the smell. The wool capital of the Netherlands fulled its cloth, in the craft's early days, with collected urine — and the citizens, with Brabant's gift for self-mockery, adopted the trade's humblest figure as their carnival identity: Tilburg becomes "Kruikenstad", jug city, each February, the jugs in question being exactly what one fears. The industry itself was mighty — King Willem II loved the town, kept a palace here and died in it — and its afterlife is exemplary: the TextielMuseum is a working textile laboratory where designers weave in the old mill, and De Pont, in another former wool works, ranks among the country's finest museums of contemporary art.

The town's second vocation is volume: the Tilburgse Kermis each July is the largest funfair in the Benelux, ten days of street-filling machinery; the 013 hall is one of the country's premier pop venues; and the Roadburn festival made Tilburg a world capital of heavy music's connoisseurs. The concert record's register — chamber concerts, choirs, church music, visiting programmes — describes the classical base, with the concert hall's seasons serving Brabant's university city. Wool, jugs, guitars and a king's palace: Tilburg's threads are coarse, strong and entirely its own.