Not London! Old St Alban, Köln

Old St Alban was one of the many, many Romanesque churches in Cologne (see previous posts, and yes alright it's twelve Romanesque churches, but even I can get a bit bored with them), but the structure there today dates from the 1490s (bell tower) and the 1890s (the façade).


It was bombed heavily during the war and has been left as it is today as a monument to the people who died during the bombing.


There's a couple of small statues (3rd picture), which can be slightly creepy depending on the light when you approach the church...


You can't usually go inside but there's ample spaces between the bars to get some striking angles.

 

Not London! St Lambertus, Düsseldorf

St Lambertus is a church down near the Rhein; one of four Roman Catholic churches in the Old Town.

This church dates from the 1390s, though the spire had to be rebuilt in the 19th century and it is crooked, which is good to know as I thought my eyes were being funny, hahahaha.

 

 

Not London! Düsseldorf

Just looking at the rest of my pictures from Düsseldorf and they're not easily classifiable, shall we say. So here are some random buildings:

 

 

 

 

Not London! Düsseldorf Johanneskirche

So we went to Düsseldorf. And... yeah. You need to have a high tolerance for big wide streets with expensive shops, let's say. Still, it's not like there was a lack of stuff to photograph.

The Hauptbahnhof is pretty big, and we walked out of it and decided to go straight ahead (to be fair to Düsseldorf we probably covered much less than half the city in our wanderings - I'm not actually sure how big it is). One of the first buildings we came to was this very impressive redbrick church, Johanneskirche:

 

 

 

The church was built in the late 19th century after two congregations joined. It was bombed in WW2 and has had various refurbishments and extensions since. It's a pretty big and imposing building, all the more so for the colour of the bricks which really made it stand out from its surroundings (actually, from most of Düsseldorf from what I remember).

Not London! Brühl

Brühl is a small town about twenty minutes out of Cologne by rail. It's a World Heritage Site because of the Augustusburgschloss and the Falkenlustschloss (which we didn't get to). It's also got a museum dedicated to Max Ernst, and is home to the amusement park Phantasialand. 


We went on a Monday and rather unhelpfully the Augustusburgschloss was shut (and seemingly the Max Ernst Museum as well), but as we had just turned up on a whim we decided to have a wander anyway. Also the Schloss is right there when you come out of the station, so it wasn't any great hardship. 


The Schloss was built on the site of a previous building in the mid-18th century (said previous building was apparently blown up by foreign troops in 1689). Having read about the inside of the building I'm now rather more disappointed that it was closed. I'll have to go again...

http://www.bruehl.de/en/tourism/tourism/castles_augustusburg.php


This is the pretty Christuskirche which is very close to the Schloss. 

Also here is a funky orange house in Brühl that I liked the look of:

 And the other pictures I took were mostly graffiti which you can see in the other post :). 

Not London! Köln Rathaus (city hall)

The city hall in Cologne is Germany's oldest. It's on the site of the Roman Praetorium (that's coming in a later post; the Praetorium was pretty big). Different parts of the Rathaus date from between the twelfth and twentieth centuries. Most of my pictures are of the the tower, which dates from the early 15th century, and the loggia (a gallery or corridor at ground level), which dates from the late 16th.  


Tower:

Loggia:

More detail: