Built like a fortress
To this day, the defiant Malakow Tower is more reminiscent of a medieval castle than a former mine - but the sight of the two large towers when the mine was founded was probably even more impressive in the past. The former carrier in the machine house also looks very impressive. At the triangle Wanne-Röhlinghausen, Wattenscheid and Bochum, the Königsgrube and Hanover collieries were built in the mid-19th century. The Hanover colliery, named after the place of residence of its founder Carl Hostmann, was built in 1857 and passed into the ownership of Alfred Krupp 25 years later. In order to create living space for the urgently needed workers, the Krupp family built, among other things, the remarkable garden town of Dahlhauser Heide in 1907 - just a few meters from the Hanover colliery. After its transfer to Ruhrkohle AG in 1969, the Hanover colliery, the last colliery in Bochum, to be closed four years later, ended a long mining tradition "deep in the west, where the sun gets dusty." While the Königsgrube colliery was completely demolished in the mid-1970s, the Malakow tower and the machine house of the Hanover colliery were preserved.