Solingen
— — the city the blade made.
Not only on a wall.
“The Wupper bends through a city that has been forging steel for seven centuries. Solingen sits in the hills east of Düsseldorf, the air still tasting faintly of the grinding shops along the river. The old hammer-mill at Balkhausen still runs; the wrought-iron Müngsten Bridge still crosses the valley a hundred metres above the water. A working city, quiet about it.
Solingen, 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.
Solingen is a city of about 159,000 in North Rhine-Westphalia, set on the slopes of the Bergisches Land east of Düsseldorf. The Wupper river cuts through its southern edge, dropping toward the Rhine. The city has carried the protected name Klingenstadt, the City of Blades, since 1938, and its workshops still produce most of Germany's straight razors, scissors, and surgical steel. The Müngsten Bridge, finished in 1897, crosses the Wupper valley at 107 metres, the tallest railway bridge in the country.
The Wupper made Solingen. From the 14th century, smiths and grinders settled along its tributaries because the falling water turned the grindstones that put the edge on the steel. The Wipperkotten and Balkhauser Kotten survive as working museums on the river's bend, their water-wheels still turning in slow rotation. The river runs only 116 kilometres from source to Rhine, but every metre of drop was once tied to a wheel, a hammer, or a stone.
The blade trade in Solingen is documented from 1363, when the city was first granted the right to mark its steel. By 1500 the local guilds had organised the grinders, hardeners, and finishers into the most concentrated cutlery economy in Europe. The Deutsches Klingenmuseum, founded in 1904, holds more than 250,000 pieces. Modern names — Wüsthof, Henckels, Böker — still mark their knives here under the Solingen ordinance, a geographic protection enforced since 1938.