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Duisburg Inner Harbour

The area of the Duisburg Inner Harbour covers the north of the old city area between the Marientor and stretches almost to the Berlin Bridge over the city motorway. The new culture mile between the City Museum (Kultur- und Stadthistorisches Museum) on the western end and the Grothe Museum on the east, can easily be reached on the underground/tram (exit Schwanentor station) or by a bus leading to Philosophenweg.

The Inner Harbour can be divided into three sections. The two older sections in the west were created in the early 19th century around the same time as the former Ruhr canal which was constructed on the express wishes of the citizens of Duisburg to provide them with a connection to the waterway traffic on the River Ruhr. The most modern section was the eastward extension to the harbour basin completed in 1893. The finished Inner Harbour soon became a busy loading and unloading area for huge deliveries of pit timber needed by the collieries in the Ruhrgebiet, and many corn silos and corn mills were also built along the banks to supply the steadily growing population of the area.

Around 12000 the course of the River Rhine moved away from Duisburg further west to the advantage of the people of the nearby town of Ruhrort and Duisburg was left stranded. In 1832 the Rhine canal (later known as the Outer Harbour) was opened to connect the city to the river once again. It had been financed by Duisburg merchants and citizens. Twelve years later, in 1844, the Ruhr canal was opened. this contained the harbour were coal was loaded and unloaded. After the railways came to the city coal traders switched the centre of their activities to the harbour. Now they started dealing in timber which was urgently needed for mining galleries in the pits. The canal was further extended between 1889 and 1893 and renamed the Inner Harbour, which now specialised in the timber trade. Steam-driven saw mills and planing works were built to process the tree trunks which had been felled in the Spessart and Schwarzwald districts and brought here on huge rafts.

It was no long before new sawing and transport techniques made raft transport redundant, and timber trading in Duisburg began to decline. The grain industry had begun to establish itself in the Inner Harbour around 1860. It owed its expansion primarily to bottlenecks in food provisions and a huge explosion in the local population due to industrialisation. The deserted timber storage sites were now used to build mills, silos and elevators to take grain from the South of Russia, the countries around the Danube, and later North America and India. Around the turn of the 20th century the city could boast of having the largest milling industry in the whole of Germany and was popularly known as the "breadbasket of the Ruhrgebiet".

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