Germany · Nordrhein-Westfalen · Remscheid
Lennep, Remscheid — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Lennep is the third largest Stadtbezirk of Remscheid, a Hanseatic town and Prussian Kreisstadt, long one of the leading places of the Bergisches Land.
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Where to stay in Lennep
Where visitors usually base themselves, and why.
The old town is the reason to stay. A hundred and sixteen listed houses stand inside a medieval plan, most of them Bergisch Baroque raised after the fire of 1746, and the whole core is compact enough to walk in an afternoon. The Neustadt has the station.
It spreads south and west from the old rampart line and carries the Amtsgericht and the Kreishaus with it, which is where the practical business of the Stadtbezirk sits. Remscheid proper is a short ride.
Things to do in and around Remscheid
Ranked by global recognition; descriptions from Wikidata (CC0).
Museums & Galleries
2- German Röntgen Museum
- Tuchmuseum Lennep
Churches & Religious Sites
3- Evangelische Stadtkirche Lennep Heritage
- Saint Bonaventura Heritage
- Klosterkirche Lennep Heritage
worth knowingacross 2 categories in and around Remscheid
About Lennep
What are the main landmarks in Lennep?
The Altstadt is the exhibit. Its medieval ground plan survives and it counts among the thirty-five selected historic town cores of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a hundred and sixteen listed houses inside it, many of them Bergisch Baroque put up after the fire of 1746. The wall came first.
A high defensive wall with two gates already stood by 1276, and the town kept market and mint rights from the 14th century and toll rights from 1371. The Neustadt is a different age. It grew south and west along the main roads after industrialisation, taking the Amtsgericht, the station and the Kreishaus, while until then the town had never spread beyond its medieval rampart line.
What is the history of Lennep?
People were on this ground five thousand years ago. Tradition puts the town's own beginnings in the 12th century, with a Fronhof and a chapel to Saint Nicholas in the source hollow of the Linepe, the farm passing about 1200 to the counts of Berg and then to duke Heinrich of Limburg, who gave it to St. Kunibert in Cologne. Town rights came between 1259 and 1276.
That makes Lennep one of the oldest towns of the Bergisches Land, counted with Wipperfürth, Ratingen and Düsseldorf as one of the four capitals of the duchy of Berg, and in 1276 it became the consultation court for the Ratingen court. Cloth and the Hanse followed. The town joined the Hanse in the 13th century and kept trading posts abroad, and its cloth industry strengthened through the 14th century until fire kept interrupting it, around 1325, again on 26 September 1563 and finally on 4 October 1746, when nearly the whole town burned.
Prussia took it after the Congress. Lennep was a canton seat in the napoleonic grand duchy from 1808, went to Prussia in 1815 as a Bürgermeisterei in the Kreis Lennep, saw a cloth workers' strike in 1850, received Prussian town rights on 17 August 1857, and was incorporated into Remscheid in 1929.
Where is Lennep?
Lennep sits on the high ground of the Bergisches Land east of the Remscheid centre, grown around the source hollow of the Lennepe brook, two days' travel from Cologne and from Dortmund on the old long-distance road toward Magdeburg, and it is the largest Remscheid Stadtbezirk by area since Bergisch-Born was added in 1975.
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More areas in Remscheid
Updated October 2026