The walk ends under a horse's tail. Hanoverians say unterm Schwanz the way other cities say under the clock - meet me beneath the rear end of the equestrian Ernst August, fifteen metres from the main station's southern door - and that is precisely where the Red Thread finishes, 4.2 kilometres after starting about a hundred metres away. The self-deprecation is the point. Around 1970 Hanover carried a national reputation as one of the most boring cities in Germany, a verdict the city could have argued with and instead decided to answer. It painted a line on its own pavement, borrowed the idea outright from Boston's Freedom Trail, and let the line make the case. Fifty-odd years later you still follow it with your head down, which is a strange way to see a city and a surprisingly good one.
The scheme came from city manager Martin Neuffer, who appreciated art and thought Hanover's image was a solvable problem. In 1969 he had an agency selected; the campaign it developed paired a public street-art programme with marketing, and in 1971 the Red Thread appeared on the ground. It runs roughly clockwise from the tourist information office at the south-east corner of Ernst-August-Platz, threads through the city centre and the site of the Altstadt, and returns to the station. Thirty-six numbered stops explain themselves along the way, with a brochure printed in ten languages and an app that covers four. The whole course is barrier-free, and the line itself is repainted every year using around seventy litres of red paint - which is, when you think about it, a municipal budget line for maintaining a joke that worked.
The thread walks you through an absence. Allied bombing destroyed all but forty of the historic old town's half-timbered buildings; a cluster of twelve survived along Burgstraße, Kramerstraße and Knochenhauerstraße, so during reconstruction the salvaged façades of other old houses were carried to those streets and reassembled around them. The result is the neue Altstadt, a real old town made of relocated parts. Some ruins were deliberately left as ruins. The Aegidienkirche was never rebuilt; its shell stands as a memorial to the victims of war and violence. The opera house, destroyed in 1943, reopened in 1950. Leibniz House, first built in 1499, where Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz lived from 1698 until his death in 1716, was rebuilt between 1981 and 1983 - about 250 metres from where it originally stood, because by then a postwar building occupied its site and had itself become protected.
Hanover's dynastic history is written across the route. Georgstraße and Georgsplatz honour George III, Duke and Prince-elector of Hanover before he was King of Hanover, and King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1760 to 1820. The Waterloo Column commemorates the defeat of Napoleon by a British-led coalition that included Hanoverian troops and the King's German Legion, alongside the Prussian army. The Leine Palace, rebuilt after the war, has housed the Landtag of Lower Saxony since 1962. The showpiece is the New Town Hall, opened in June 1913, where the new federal state of Lower Saxony was proclaimed in November 1946 and where four models in the main hall show the city around 1689, just before the war, just after it, and now. To reach the observation platform of the 97.73-metre building you take a lift that climbs 43 metres along a curve, leaning up to 17 degrees as it goes. On a clear day the view runs to the Harz.
Where the thread meets the Leine it passes three enormous, brightly painted, unapologetically round female figures by Niki de Saint Phalle, christened Charlotte, Sophie and Caroline after Charlotte Buff, Sophia of Hanover and Caroline Herschel. On Saturdays the flea market spreads along both banks around them. The ground underfoot is itself an artefact: from 1541 the eastern bank was raised by roughly three metres using the rubble of a castle demolished in 1371 and the hill it had stood on. The Beguine Tower nearby takes its name from the religious women in whose garden it was built - the first written record of it, in 1357, exists because they complained about the noise of its construction. Seven centuries later, that is still the most relatable document in the city archive.
At the eastern end of Kramerstraße a marker in the pavement identifies the one spot from which all four main Lutheran church towers can be sighted at once. The Market Church, Hanover's principal Lutheran church and a fourteenth-century building restored in 1952, hangs eleven bells, the largest of them the largest in Lower Saxony and rung only on special occasions. The Old Town Hall, begun in 1410, has been altered so often that its original ground floor is now the cellar, the surrounding ground having risen around it; a mascaron on its Köbelinger Street façade was meant to ward off evil, though local legend prefers the story of a boy whose face was turned to stone as punishment. From there the thread runs up to Kröpcke, the central square where all three subway tunnels converge, and finally back to the station - to the horse, and the tail, and whoever is waiting under it.
The Red Thread loops through Hanover's city centre around 52.3754N, 9.7413E, in Lower Saxony. The line itself is a painted stripe on the pavement and invisible from the air, but its circuit is easy to trace from above: Hannover Hauptbahnhof at the north end, the green copper dome of the New Town Hall at 97.73 m to the south-west, the Leine curving around the old town, and the Maschsee lake beyond the Town Hall as a strong orienting feature. An overview altitude of 2,000 to 3,000 feet AGL frames the whole circuit. Hannover-Langenhagen (EDDV) lies roughly 11 km north of the centre, so the city core sits under the approach; Bremen (EDDW) is about 100 km north-west. On clear days from the Town Hall platform the Harz massif is visible to the south-east, a useful long-range visual reference.