The name first appears in writing in the year 1040, attached to a settlement called Villa Cruoninga - already, the records imply, a place that mattered. By the thirteenth century Groningen was a serious northern trade centre with a wall around it, and its dialect was carrying so much weight in the surrounding lands that neighbouring regions adopted it. The most influential stretch came at the end of the fifteenth century, when the nearby province of Friesland was administered from here. Construction on the Martini Tower, the city's still-dominant landmark, finished in this period. At roughly 102 metres tall in its original form, it ranked among the tallest structures in the northern Netherlands. The pivot away from that height of influence came in 1594, when Groningen chose the wrong side of the Eighty Years' War. The city sided with Spain, was reconquered, and joined the Dutch Republic on different terms.

Groningers still set off fireworks every 28 August. The date marks the end of a siege in 1672, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, when the Bishop of Münster Bernhard von Galen - locally remembered as Bommen Berend, or "Bombing Bernard" - turned the full force of his army on the city. The walls held. The bishop withdrew. The relief that followed gave Groningen one of its most enduring annual celebrations, Groningens Ontzet, complete with music and pyrotechnics that echo off the canal ring more than 350 years later. The city's medieval wall is largely gone, but the canal that traced its outer edge - the diepenring - still defines downtown. Cross the diepenring and you have left the old city, even though no plaque marks the line.

Groningen survived most of the Second World War in better shape than many Dutch cities, but the end of the war was harder. In April 1945 Canadian forces fought through the streets in what became known as the Battle of Groningen. The fighting lasted several days. Much of the Grote Markt, the central square that had hosted markets for centuries, was destroyed. The Martinitoren, its church, the Goudkantoor, and the city hall all survived, somehow. The square was rebuilt, and the eastern side has been rebuilt again in the present century - the latest in a long series of edits to a public space that has been reshaped, every century or so, by force or by intention.

What happened in the 1970s is the foundational story of modern Groningen. Faced with traffic strangling a compact medieval core, the city council made cars effectively impossible inside the diepenring. The space that opened up was given to cyclists and pedestrians. Decades later the consequences are everywhere. Traffic lights have rain sensors that give bicycles priority on wet days. Some intersections turn green for cyclists from all directions at once - a choreography that has to be seen during rush hour to be believed. Residents average 1.4 bikes per person. The university accounts for tens of thousands of students cycling between campus and city centre, but the habit is universal across age groups. Bike theft is, predictably, a serious annoyance; locals recommend two locks, one of them a heavy chain.

The year in Groningen has a rhythm. In January, Eurosonic Noorderslag turns the city into Europe's biggest music industry showcase, with hundreds of bands playing pubs and clubs across the centre. On Good Friday the largest flower market in the northern Netherlands draws over 100,000 visitors, a substantial share of them German. King's Day in April fills the streets with the country's largest free-form flea market. August brings the Noorderzon arts festival and the Paradigm electronic music festival. Every other autumn, the Noorderlicht photography festival arrives. None of this happens in isolation. The Groninger Museum - a multicoloured postmodern complex straddling the canal between the central station and the old town - anchors the cultural year, and the surrounding canals, the late-medieval Guest Houses tucked in courtyards along the Pelsterstraat and Peperstraat, and the long pedestrianised Herestraat give the visitor something to do between events.