I took the train to Düsseldorf – here’s my guide to the city

Next stop in our series marking the rail pass’s 50th birthday is a city in the heartland of industrial Germany, home to avant-garde art, electronic music and high fashion

Düsseldorf’s residents call their home “the 10-minute city”, because it rarely takes longer than that to get wherever you want to go. That’s a big claim for somewhere that boasts no fewer than 50 stadtteile (mini districts), but it’s backed up by a transit system of U-Bahns and S-Bahns that gets you around easily. And therein lies Düsseldorf’s great appeal: a small city of just over 600,000 inhabitants, with the infrastructure, the internationality and the sheer cultural heft of a much larger place. Add in the fact that more than 57% of its area is green space, and you can understand why a recent study ranked it the world’s sixth best city to live.

There’s plenty of wealth at play here, much of it being splashed along the tree-lined, canal-adjacent Königsallee, one of Germany’s most famous shopping streets. As the postwar capital of North Rhine-Westphalia (established in 1946), the most populous state of the nation, Düsseldorf became a hub for global business and finance, and the well-dressed glitterati who frequent the kilometre-long stretch of designer stores on “the Kö” have earned it a reputation for snobbishness.