Norrkoping Industrial Landscape

The Motala Strom drops through the middle of Norrkoping and the fall was used first for mills and then, from the eighteenth century, for textiles, until the town was producing most of Sweden's wool cloth and calling itself the Manchester of the north. The industry collapsed in the 1960s and 70s. What makes the place unusual is that the buildings were kept: some thirty hectares of yellow-brick mills, races, weirs and iron bridges along the water, now holding a university campus, the work museum in the wedge-shaped Strykjarnet building, the town museum and a concert hall. You walk it as a district rather than visiting a site.

What you actually see

• Yellow-brick mills along the river - about thirty hectares of them.
• Races, weirs and iron bridges - the water system that drove it.
• The Strykjarnet building - the wedge-shaped mill, now the work museum.
• A university campus in the mills - the reuse that saved them.

When to go

Year round; the water is fullest in spring. Two to three hours.

Honest expectations

Museums close on Mondays and have shorter winter hours. Some buildings are offices and closed. The district is quiet in the evening. Interpretation outdoors is mostly in Swedish.

Nearby

Kolmarden is north; Gota canal runs west.