Kolonie Landwehr

Kolonie Landwehr is a miners' settlement in the Bövinghausen district of Dortmund, part of the Zeche Zollern complex. The Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG builds the mine as its showcase. Beside it, the company lays out a model colony for its workers. Historicist style unifies houses and colliery buildings, and the city lists the ensemble as a single monument.

The first house goes up in 1898, a two-family home for foremen on Grubenweg, the lane to the mine gate. A villa for the operations manager follows on Rhader Weg in 1900. By 1904 eight officials' houses with 29 flats line both streets, their facades dressed in curved gables, bay windows and decorative half-timbering. The second quarter rises beside the Landwehrbach stream: 23 workers' houses with 87 flats, drawn up by Paul Knobbe alone. Five house types alternate on the garden-city pattern, most of them housing four families each. The houses sit staggered along the street, each with a small front garden, under old plane trees. With so few residents, and the rest of Bövinghausen next door, the plan foresees no church, school or shop.

In 1983 the then owner, Viterra, modernises the flats together with the city and the tenants. By the end of 2002, most houses pass into private hands, largely to their sitting tenants. The LWL Industrial Museum offers tours of the colony from its base at the colliery. They also take in Fuchsweg, a self-help settlement of the 1950s. An anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage, the settlement sits on the Industrial Heritage Trail with the mine. Through all these changes, the plots keep their kitchen gardens and stables for self-sufficiency, the garden-city idea still at work.