Cologne City Museum

About this place

A museum about Cologne itself: how it became a Roman colonia, then a rich medieval trading city, then an industrial one flattened in the war and rebuilt in a hurry. The exhibits are everyday things rather than treasures — shop signs, clothes, toys, propaganda material, and bottles of the scented water that carried the city's name around the world. The museum has moved. Its home was the Zeughaus, the city arsenal of sixteen hundred and six, until water got into the building in twenty seventeen and asbestos was found in the walls; it was emptied in twenty eighteen and stands empty still. The museum reopened in March twenty twenty-four inside a converted former fashion store on Minoritenstrasse, with a new approach built on themes and interactive stations rather than a chronological march. On the tower of the old arsenal there remains a golden winged car, placed there by the Cologne artist HA Schult in nineteen ninety-one and a landmark every local knows. The oddity is that the museum left and the car stayed, so plenty of visitors still head for the tower and only then discover that the collection is somewhere else.