Industrial culture by bike
Cycling to the cathedrals of Berlin's industrial culture
Tour 1: Warm light and cold beer
Tour 2: Production and ammunition
Tour 4: Innovation and elegance
Steam engines got things started - initially used to drive water pumps in mining, they ushered in the age of mass production at the beginning of the 19th century. Companies like Siemens, AEG or Borsig emerged and employed more and more workers. Berlin's population doubled within a few years. You can explore the traces of this era by bike on several thematic routes. The tours are each 20 to 25 kilometres long.
Tour 1: Warm light and cold beer
During industrialisation, not only factories and industrial buildings were built, but also numerous breweries to quench the workers' thirst for beer. The Berlin Centre for Industrial Culture takes you to the remaining monuments in the Mitte and Pankow districts with the "Warm Light and Cool Beer" cycle route.
Follow the almost 25km route to these selected sights. But feel free to look around. You are sure to discover more exciting backyards, manufactories or interesting people - that is the colourful diversity of Berlin!
Tour Map
For safe navigation through Berlin, use either the digital route guidance through the following app or the flyer, available in all tourist information offices, many hotels as well as the Berlin district offices.
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Tour 2: Production and ammunition
On this tour of Spandau you will get to know the former centre of the Prussian armaments industry. In the 18th century, armaments production moved here and was replaced by industrial factories at the beginning of the 20th century. This was accompanied by new housing and leisure concepts for workers, of which building projects such as the large housing estate Siemensstadt or the Volkspark Jungfernheide bear witness.
This varied tour combines impressions of Spandau's old town with its citadel, whose buildings date back to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with modern residential and industrial architecture from the 20th century.
Tour Map
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Tour 3: Water and electricity
The tour takes you from Treptow to Oberschöneweide, where the centre of Berlin's electrical industry developed at the beginning of the 20th century. The buzzword "electropolis" is also often used for the exciting period of Berlin's electrification. It stands for a period in which more and more of the newly emerging power plants fed electricity into the not yet unified grid, the first private households were supplied with electricity and factories made their production more and more efficient with the help of electrical machines. Power plants and factories entered into a special symbiosis with shipping, which supplied the necessary raw materials.
Tour Map
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Tour 4: Innovation and elegance
On this route you will discover sites of Berlin's industrial culture around Tiergarten and Moabit. They illustrate how innovation, science and entrepreneurship worked together in Berlin. Many of the institutions you encounter on this route have deep historical roots in Berlin. The elegance of their architecture reflects the self-image of an aspiring international metropolis. For example, the Königliche Porzellanmanufaktur (Royal Porcelain Manufactory), which was founded in 1763 and made the leap into Berlin's industrialisation. Scientific institutions such as the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, founded on the initiative of Werner von Siemens and Hermann von Helmholtz, bear witness to the high level of science achieved in Germany during the Weimar Republic.
Tour Map
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Tour 5: Railway and airfield
This tour takes you to Kreuzberg, Tempelhof and Schöneberg, where you can best explore the traces of the railway and the oldest airport in Berlin. We're referring, of course, to Tempelhof Airport, which has since been shut down. No planes take off here any more, but it's far from being really quiet because of that. The monumental architecture from the 1930s is now the venue for numerous events. For example, visit the viewing platform and the Tempelhof Tower THF or drive across the Tempelhofer Feld, the largest inner-city open space in the world.
Tour Map
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