All that cash pays for some eye-catching architecture from names like Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry, and it patronises a succession of big public galleries. Düsseldorf is better known as the Ruhr’s writing desk, filled with company headquarters a place where workers relax and industrialists can spend their salaries. The former offers an intersection with more traditional tourism, thanks to its famous cathedral as well as river cruises down the vineyard-lined Rhine. The key entry points to the region are still Cologne and Düsseldorf. To a new generation of traveller, these converted mines and mills are as interesting as any castle or church.

The industrial city of Essen was even declared European Capital of Culture back in 2010, and visitor numbers have increased ever since. This has included the conversion of a coal mine (Essen’s Zeche Zollverein) into what is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, and a blast furnace (Duisburg’s Landscape Park) into a mecca for film directors and scuba divers. Over the last couple of decades, all the coal mines have closed, as have some of the heavy industries, but instead of leaving their sites to dereliction, creative thinking has set about repurposing what were once the afterthoughts of industry. So why does it feature in a travel magazine? The answer lies in a world-leading regeneration. This is a region whose combination of bountiful coal seams and a generous waterway (the river Rhine) created the perfect conditions for Germany’s wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that followed the Second World War, as steel works, chemical plants and car factories sprouted up across the region. Instead, its heartland is a densely populated and scenically underwhelming region of factory chimneys, blast furnaces and slag heaps, known as the Ruhrgebiet.

This is not the Black Forest or Bavaria, with their castles, cobblestones and half-timbered villages.

As destinations go, North Rhine-Westphalia is a rather unconventional one.

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