The name Tilliburg first appears in a document from 709 AD, and then disappears from the record for centuries. Through the Middle Ages, Tilburg was less a town than a constellation of hamlets scattered around the herdgangen, the triangular open commons where peasants grazed sheep on poor sandy soil. Names like Korvel, Heikant, Broekhoven, and Heuvel still mark those old herding triangles today, and you can trace their three-cornered shapes on a modern street map. Wool came naturally to a place with this much sheep and this little arable. By the seventeenth century there were perhaps three hundred home looms in town. By the nineteenth, fueled by industrial steam and the protective enthusiasm of King William II, Tilburg was the wool capital of the Netherlands.

King William II of the Netherlands liked Tilburg in a way Dutch kings have not usually liked particular towns. Here I can breathe freely and I feel happy, he once said. He sponsored sheep improvement, built farms, founded a cavalry barracks, and in 1847 commissioned a country palace on what is now Tilburg's town hall site. Construction finished in 1849, just days before he died there. An obelisk to him stands nearby. The local football club, Willem II Tilburg, is named for him. A young pupil at the King William II school, between 1866 and 1868, was a thirteen-year-old named Vincent van Gogh, who was taking his earliest drawing lessons in the city that had charmed his sovereign.

When the wool industry collapsed in the 1960s, the mayor was Cees Becht. His response was to clear the wreckage. Out came the Koningswei working-class neighborhood, replaced by the Koningsplein, a square that locals now find oddly empty most of the year. Out came the classicist old city hall, a registered national monument, replaced by a nine-story black complex. Out came the century-old central railway station, lifted onto a viaduct to ease traffic. Out came rows of old mill housing, including a famously healthy lime tree on the Heuvel chopped down on 27 April 1994 to make room for a bicycle parking garage. Becht earned his nickname honestly. By the end, Tilburg had a new skyline, with three buildings tall enough to count as Dutch skyscrapers, and a wounded historical fabric the city is still patching.

Some of the wool mills survived in unexpected forms. In 1992, the contemporary art museum De Pont opened inside a former wool mill, its concrete pillars and skylit halls now hung with works by Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, and Richard Serra. Anish Kapoor's Skymirror is bolted to the square outside. Across town, the Textile Museum, opened in 1958 in another former factory, doubles as a working laboratory where designers still spin, weave, and dye on industrial looms, producing pieces that end up in collections worldwide. The TextielLab is rare in Europe: a place where artists can prototype textile work on the same machines that once made suit fabric. Tilburg's industrial past did not so much end as turn experimental.

Today around 230,000 people live in Tilburg, making it the seventh-largest city in the Netherlands. Tilburg University, founded in 1927 in this Catholic stronghold, is now globally ranked in economics and the social sciences. Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts trains musicians and visual artists. The 013 concert hall draws international audiences for Roadburn and other festivals. The Trappist monks at the nearby Koningshoeven Abbey have brewed La Trappe beer here since 1884. On the western edge of town, in the industrial area of Vossenberg, Tesla runs its European assembly and distribution operation, the first electric cars in Europe to come off a Tilburg line in 2013. The wool capital became a logistics capital, then a knowledge capital, and somehow still feels like an unfussy provincial Brabantine town where everybody knows who Cees the Demolisher was.