Garden City of Welheim

Living in your own house with a garden: What still sounds good today stood for superior living quality in the middle of the 20th century. The increasing need for workers inevitably led to the construction of a separate settlement in Welheim. In the spirit of the English garden city movement, green areas, avenues and attractive buildings provided a kind of "balance" to the hard everyday work underground. Much, however, was more appearance than reality.

In 1914 the United Welheim mine produced the first coal. The construction of a settlement for the colliery employees had already begun a year earlier and was to last for a good decade. The Welheim settlement was built in the style of an English garden city: winding streets, self-contained street spaces, "picturesque" groups of houses, green areas and gardens. All this should distract the miners from the hard everyday life, ensure harmony and, last but not least, bind the workers to their place of residence and thus to the mine. In 1931 mining at the pit ended and the pit was converted into a hydrogenation plant. This also changed the structure of the inhabitants of what had previously been a miners' settlement. Due to its location in the middle of industrial plants, Welheim was exposed to numerous air raids during the Second World War. Despite severe damage, most of the original building fabric has been preserved to this day.

In Welheim, too, the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Emscher Park at the beginning of the 1990s provided a real push for modernization and an improvement in the quality of living. Around 72,6 million euros flowed into the renovation, among other things, the apartments were given new floor plans with bathrooms. During the restoration of roofs, facades, windows and house entrances, the monument value of the buildings was fully preserved.