Alongside the railway tracks at Warschauer Straße, in the Friedrichshain neighbourhood of Berlin, is a former railway repair yard that has been turned into a post-industrial cultural oasis, with bars and clubs, a skatepark and a climbing centre, amongst many other small and medium sized projects. This is the “RAW-Gelände”, from the wonderfully German word “Reichsbahnausbesserungswerkstatt” – the repair yard of the national railways.

This was the oldest company Friedrichshain, founded in 1867 for the Prussian railways and in particular, the “Ostbahn” which ran from Berlin to Königsberg and East Prussia (present day Kaliningrad). By the end of the nineteenth century the repair yard was employing over 1000 workers, and it continued operations through the GDR years when it was named for the Bavarian communist Franz Stenzer, who was murdered by the Nazis. In 1991, following reunification, the yard was closed, and since the end of the twentieth century it has begun its new life as a cultural hub, although walking through the complex you still get a sense of what it used to be – which is part of the attraction.

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Whenever we get the chance we head south from Berlin to Leipzig, only an hour and a half away by train (unless you like to take the more leisurely route), where we have good friends to visit and the added bonus of one of my favourite cities in Germany. Normally we spend most of our time in the slightly-beaten-up but increasingly trendy neighbourhood around the Karl-Liebknecht-Straße south of the city centre, which is where our friends lived and which, with its combination of cafes and bars, semi-squatted cultural centres, and mixed population, reminds both Katrin and I of the Prenzlauer Berg of ten or more years ago.

This time we were taken west, not to the old industrial neighbourhood of Schleußig – which is also well worth a visit – but to Plagwitz, which was hosting one of their quarterly “Westpaket” events, which combines handicrafts and fleamarket stalls in an old iron and steel works and along the Karl-Heine-Straße, but also readings, performances, concerts and other cultural offerings. We entered the market through a anarchist travellers site parked up alongside the canal on a patch of wasteland, which was certainly a singular way to arrive, before we stepped into the vast industrial hall to explore what goodies the creative folk of Leipzig had come up with.

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We booked a house in Sweden more or less at random. We knew we wanted to be somewhere north of Vimmerby, and within a couple of hours of Stockholm. The house we found  by the Järleån river was about halfway between the towns of Nora and Lindesberg, less than an hour’s drive north of the university city of Örebro. We made that drive for the first time through driving rain, the windscreen wipers working overtime to keep the street ahead somewhat visible. What we could see, through the blurred windows and the spray of passing trucks was a landscape of thick forests, the occasionally rocky outcrop, and the knowledge that somewhere, amongst the trees, were hundreds of lakes, great and small.

What was not immediately clear was the influence on the landscape of centuries of mining, of forestry and iron production, that made this region – known as the Bergslagen – the resource-rich heart of Swedish industry. The Bergslagen is a place where Alfred Nöbel had a dynamite factory, with three-metre thick walls to survive an accidental explosion of the product, and which was used to excavate the earth. In the eighteenth century a quarter of all of Europe’s iron production came from hundreds of small foundries in the region. We met an English guy who is working in the region, and he told us that mines and mining remain an important industry, although the number of employees needed is down from its peak and many of the mines have been long abandoned and the scarred landscape returned to some form of nature.

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