Aside from the guided tours, many of us explored the city on our own or with our hosts. Liz and I were were lucky enough to be shown other sights by Gottfried and Hildegard Jung, including the Helmut-Kohl-Ufer by the Rhine and his modest grave in Adenauer Park and, just behind the Rathaus, the Speyer Kulturhof (City Gallery) and a bespoke, traditional printing press.
A particularly interesting excursion was the old industrial quarter called Industriehof (or I-HOF as some people shorten it to) in the north-east of Speyer, alongside the Rhine. It was once home to the Speyer Celluloid Factory which, in its 1930s heyday, employed over 1,000 people. It closed in 1968 but the site was well-maintained and used for miscellaneous industrial and semi-industrial businesses. In recent years lots of small enterprises have moved in. Our hosts Gottfried and Hildegard Jung took us there and we spent an enjoyable hour or so wandering around artists’ studios and galleries, cafés and restaurants, and a few cool shops and antiques stores. We even caught an impromptu concert organized by microbrewery, Black Stork.
Chichester of course is about half the size of Speyer and has never had an industrial quarter of the scale of Industriehof, certainly not in the factories-made-of-bricks sense, Shippams excepted. Terminus Road and Quarry Lane don’t quite have the industrial chic of Industriehof. Woudn’t it be great if the old House of Fraser on West Street could be revitalised along similar lines?
