De city of Essen would have flourished without the
Krupp Company. Essen is as much Krupp as Krupp is Essen. You can't distinguish
one or the other as far as urban development is concerned. Sure, the area knew
many types of industry, namely coal mining, glass works, furnaces, cokes works,
gas works and of course steel works, but these were mostly located outside of
the pre-existing urban centres and gave rise to a rapid suburbanisation via
workers colonies known as Siedlungen
(literally: settlements, as the people inhabiting these places mostly came in
anew to settle in these places).
Ever since the Krupp Company was founded on the edge
of the city of Essen in 1811 the fate of
this historic city and the industrialisation became interlocked. From
modest beginnings of an almost failed industrial company Krupp grew to become a
city within a city, driving both the growth and the direction of urban
development of the city. In 1819 a small factory was built on the edge of Altendorf
just outside of Essen's medieval city
limits. In 1924 the large townhouse in Essen has to be sold to free up cash for
the business and the family builds a new modest timber framed house next to the
factory. This will become the centre of the later Krupp Steelworks that occupy
more than double the area than the whole of the medieval city.
As the company grows so does the workforce. These are
initially housed in scant dwelling built hastily by private developers or in
large existing housing that is rented out per room to whole families. This
pattern is basically true in the first phases of industrialisation everywhere!
In 1863 the Kruppsche Wohnungsbau (Krupp House building) starts its activities
as a way of balancing working conditions with a wellness program for workers,
but also as a means of binding the factory workers to their employers. So in
1863 The Arbeiterkolonie Westend is
built on the edge of the factory site directly west of the city of Essen. This
worker colony was followed by Neu Westend
(1870), Nordhof (1871), Schederhof (1872-73), Baumhof (1871 + 1890) and Kronenberg (1872-74).
The Krupp Steel Works (W) with the Krupp House (H) was
surrounded by a number of workers colonies that have now vanished. The first to
be built was Westend (1), consciously located upwind from the steel works.
Later the workers colonies of Nordhof (2), Schederhof (3), Kronenberg (4) and
Baumhof (5) followed. Krupp also funded the city park (Stadtpark -S). The steel
works occupied a much larger area than the neighbouring medieval city of Essen
(E).
These colonies are very similar to the housing built
for miners all around the Ruhr Area. The name workers colony is very apt as
they were built in one building campaign (although Arbeiterkolonie Baumhof was more than doubled in 1890) and were
meant as complete new settlements. These colonies are always located near the
work place. In the case of the Krupp Company they were situated on or adjacent
to the Steel works on the west side of the medieval city. These workers
colonies are very regular in their layout with parallel streets often on a grid
and housing in long rows. Most of this housing were Mehrfamilienhäuser (Multiple Family Housing) although some provision
was made for single young man and later women in the form of large dormitory
hostels. Not unlike the new housing in the colonies these settlements were
strictly orthogonal and only reacted to their surroundings at the edges.
These colonies were very successful and provided much
needed housing for Krupp workers. The ideas on housing changed however, and by
1890 the family house was placed at the heart of the company housing policy by
Friedrich Alfred (see also Altenhof). The rapid expansion of activities at the
steel works meant the decline of these workers colonies located within or adjacent
to the factory site. In 1938 Kronenberg is demolished to make way for a new
tank factory and the expansion of the cast steel plant. Westend, Norddorf,
Baumhof and Schederhof were (partly) destroyed by bombs and replaced by offices
and industrial buildings after 1947. None of the oldest Krupp company housing
remains, except for a few so-called Meisterhäuser, built for overseers in 1860.
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