Hanover

Hanover began as a small village of ferrymen and fishermen on the east bank of the Leine. Its position at a natural crossroads made it a sizeable town by the 13th century, and it received town privileges in 1241. In 1636 George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, moved the residence of his principality of Calenberg here, and in 1692 the duchy was raised to an electorate, known after its capital as the Electorate of Hanover.

In 1714 the elector George Louis succeeded to the British throne as George I, and for more than a century, until 1837, the electors and later kings of Hanover were also kings of Great Britain. They rarely visited — between 1760 and 1837 there was only one short royal visit, by George IV in 1821 — but the link left its mark in the Herrenhausen Gardens and in the King's German Legion, formed in Britain by soldiers from Hanover during the Napoleonic Wars. The electorate became the Kingdom of Hanover in 1814, and the personal union ended in 1837, when the British crown passed to Queen Victoria and Hanover to her uncle Ernest Augustus. The kingdom lasted until 1866, when Prussia defeated and annexed it, making the city a provincial capital.

As a major railway junction and industrial centre, Hanover was a prime target in the Second World War: 88 air raids destroyed more than 90 per cent of the city centre and killed more than 6,000 civilians. The ruin of the Aegidienkirche was left as a memorial. In 1946 Hanover became the capital of the new state of Lower Saxony, grew rapidly during the post-war economic boom, and in 2000 hosted the world exhibition, Expo 2000.

The city's courtly past is best seen at Herrenhausen, where the Great Garden, shaped by Sophia of Hanover from 1683, remains one of the most distinguished baroque gardens in Europe and hosts festivals all summer, from the International Fireworks Competition to the Kleines Fest of street performers. The letters of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, kept in the library named after him, have been on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register since 2007.

Modern art has a strong presence. Niki de Saint Phalle gave the city her Nanas on the Leine and a decorated grotto in the Great Garden, and the Sprengel Museum holds one of the country's most important modern collections; the Kestnergesellschaft, with more than 4,000 members, is the largest art society in Germany. Cabaret has its own festivals, among them the Calenberg Cabaret Weeks and the Hanover Cabaret Festival.

The great popular event is the Schützenfest, the world's largest marksmen's festival, founded in 1529, whose parade of more than 12,000 participants winds 12 km through the city, and its funfair draws large crowds every year. Hanover also lays claim to Germany's first rugby team, founded in 1878, and the Maschsee is busy with rowing, sailing and dragon-boat racing. The city lies in the Low German dialect area, of which it is the fifth-largest city.

Hanover had 535,932 people in 2021 — about 536,000 — making it the 13th-largest city in Germany, and the surrounding Hanover Region has about 1.16 million. The population has grown since the city became the state capital in 1946, and the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s brought a large migrant population, drawn largely from Turkey, Greece and Italy.

The biggest employer in the region is the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles factory at Stöcken, on the Mittelland Canal. Continental, founded in Hanover in 1871, is one of the city's major companies, the travel group TUI and the audio maker Sennheiser are based here, and insurers such as Talanx make the city a centre of the industry. Trade fairs such as the Hanover Fair, Domotex, Ligna and Agritechnica fill the world's largest exhibition grounds, and Hanover Medical School, one of Germany's leading medical schools, and Leibniz University are major employers and centres of study.

Districts such as List, Oststadt and Linden keep streets of late-19th-century houses with historicist and Art Nouveau decoration. Weekends are spent in the Eilenriede and around the Maschsee, and the Christmas markets mark the end of the year.

Hanover's best-known contribution to the table is a drinking custom rather than a dish. The Lüttje Lage grew out of the old habit of drinking the local Broyhan beer together with spirits: beer and Korn, a grain schnapps, are drunk at the same moment from two separate glasses.

The local dessert is Welfenspeise, or Welf pudding, created by a Hanoverian chef and named after the colours of the House of Welf, the dynasty that ruled the land. Its white bottom layer is a cooked milk and vanilla sauce folded into stiffly whipped egg white; once chilled, it is covered with a yellow layer of wine sauce made from beaten egg yolk and white wine. It is said to have become the favourite of Ernest Augustus, Elector of Hanover. Around Hanover the grain sausage known elsewhere as Knipp goes by the name Calenberger Pfannenschlag, made from oat groats, pork and broth and seasoned with allspice and pepper.

For everyday eating, the Markthalle on the edge of the Old Town is the place for a lunchtime meal at the counters, while Linden's Limmerstraße has the city's liveliest mix of small restaurants, from Vietnamese to traditional Lower Saxon cooking, and the cafés of the Lister Meile fill on fine afternoons.