Münster
— — a quiet university town that learned to ride bicycles.
Not only on a wall.
“An old episcopal city in the flat country of Westphalia, rebuilt with patience after the war. The Prinzipalmarkt arcade curves through the centre, gabled houses brought back stone by stone in the 1950s. There are more bicycles than people. The promenade ring follows the line of the vanished walls, and on a Saturday morning the market on the cathedral square smells of bread and coffee. The Peace of Westphalia was signed here in 1648, in the same town hall that still faces the square.
Münster, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Münster is the capital of the Münsterland region in North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of about 320,000. It sits on the river Aa in the flat Westphalian basin, roughly 60 kilometres north of Dortmund and 65 kilometres south-west of Osnabrück. The city was founded around 793 as a Carolingian monastic settlement, and its name comes from the Latin monasterium. The University of Münster, founded in 1780, has more than 45,000 students, which gives the historic centre a working academic feel and explains, in part, the city's celebrated bicycle culture.
The Prinzipalmarkt is the historic market arcade of gabled merchant houses that defines the city centre. Most of Münster's old town was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944 and 1945, and the Prinzipalmarkt was rebuilt house by house through the 1950s using salvaged stone and the original facades, an early German example of careful post-war reconstruction. The Historisches Rathaus, the town hall on the same arcade, contains the Friedenssaal where the Treaty of Münster was signed in 1648, ending the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch Republic and forming half of the Peace of Westphalia.
Münster Hauptbahnhof is on the Hamburg to Cologne ICE line and reaches Düsseldorf in about 90 minutes. The Promenade is a 4.5-kilometre tree-lined ring that follows the line of the demolished medieval walls and is reserved for bicycles and pedestrians; locals call it the most efficient way to cross the centre. The Saturday market on the Domplatz, in front of St Paulus Dom, runs from early morning, with regional Westphalian sausage and pumpernickel among the steady stalls. The Aasee lake on the western edge of the centre is a 15-minute walk from the cathedral.