Kokerei Hansa

Description

In the Huckarde district of Dortmund, the Hansa coking plant shapes the region’s industrial heritage as an important architectural and industrial monument. The site is a stop on the European Route of Industrial Heritage and, together with the adjacent Deusenberg, is associated with plans for the International Garden Exhibition 2027.

As a large-scale coking plant, Hansa was built in 1927/28 as part of rationalisation measures; it replaced several outdated small coking plants of the Hansa, Westhausen and Germania collieries in northwest Dortmund. The first two oven batteries each contained 65 ovens; further batteries of 80 ovens each followed in 1940/41, expanding the site into a central coking plant. The final expansion took place in 1968 with Battery 0 (30 ovens); at peak times the coking plant provided employment for up to 1,100 people. Damage to Batteries I and II in 1945 led to restoration completed by 1955 with 62 ovens each.

The coking plant initially received its coking coal from the neighbouring Zeche Hansa and later via a conveyor belt and feeder rail lines from several mines; after other pits closed, deliveries were eventually made via a newly created rail connection to the regional freight railway. In full operation the 314 ovens processed around 7,000 t of coal blend per day and produced up to 5,400 t of coke, primarily for the Hüttenwerke Union (later Phoenix). The crude gas generated during coking (about 2,000,000 m³/day) was cleaned in a coal by-products plant; part went to steelworks, while a larger share was compressed by horizontal, steam-driven two-stage gas-piston compressors to about 8.6 bar, finally purified and fed into the gas transmission network. Final shutdown took place on 15 December 1992; capacities were replaced by a more modern coking plant. The locomotive workshop north of the site at Mooskamp remained in operation until 2001.

Since 1995 the Kokerei Hansa has been owned by the Stiftung Industriedenkmalpflege und Geschichtskultur; from 1998 most of the facilities have been protected as monuments and recorded in the City of Dortmund’s list of monuments. After the shutdown several rare animal and plant species have settled on the site.

The ensemble is accessible to visitors by guided tours; large areas remain closed for safety reasons, and a signposted “small path” provides views. Since 2001 the locomotive workshop at Mooskamp has housed a local transport museum with historic Dortmund trams. The restoration of the compressor hall with its five gas-piston compressors was completed in 2005; the hall also serves as an exhibition space. Non-monument-conforming plant parts were removed; major dismantlings took place in 2005 and 2013, and two listed gas extractors were preserved and relocated. All buildings of monument value have been refurbished; in 2011 the wooden natural-draft cooling towers were restored in a manner appropriate to their listed status. In 2008 a large climbing centre opened in a former turbo-compressor building, and since 2010 a former training workshop has been used as an exhibition space. The Hochhaus Hansa project was agreed as a three-year art and exhibition project between the Stiftung and an art institute.

The coking plant is reachable by U47 from Dortmund Hbf to the Parsevalstraße stop; the official entrance is at Emscherallee 11.