TECHNICAL MONUMENTS

As the second largest Czech city and an important industrial centre in the 19th and 20th centuries, Brno has a lot to offer lovers of technical monuments.

Especially the city’s east side and both banks of the Svitava still host engineering companies with long traditions and grounds that are interesting sights in themselves – První brněnská strojírna, Zetor, Šmeral, Alstom, Siemens, and Královopolská strojírna to the north. Other spectacular industrial companies can still be seen even though their time has passed – we can recall the Kras complex of clothing factories, Zbrojovka in Židenice, and the more modern Lachema in Řečkovice.

What really turned Brno into a city was its textile industry. From the end of the 18th century, factories sprung up especially in the Brno suburbs of Horní and Dolní Cejl and later transformed into modern carding, spinning, weaving, and dyeing mills, the production of which was known throughout the world and gave Brno the nickname of the Moravian Manchester. Although the Brno textile tradition became history at the turn of the millennium, industry in the city has continued to develop in the modern spirit.

Let us here turn back to monuments to the famous period of the 19th and 20th centuries that have been left in the city over the past 200 years.

It is especially worth mentioning the dozens of scattered buildings of former textile mills; factory grounds; under- and above-ground canals, often older than the city itself; the complicated development of railway junctions; gasworks; power stations including the dam at the reservoir near the city; and the history of public transit, brewing, the soaring buildings at and around the exhibition centre, and many other places connected to industry, transit, and energy.

Author of the text: Jiří Kalina

More information: http://druhebrno.smerem.cz