Glindow Brickworks Museum

The Ziegeleimuseum Glindow stands on the site of a former brickworks beside the Glindower See near Werder in Brandenburg. The museum occupies a small tower built about 1890, once used to watch for barges bringing clay or to impress visitors with the factory’s scale. The surrounding area was once part of a vast brick-making district that supplied Berlin and other cities with handmade bricks for centuries. The museum shows how monks from nearby Lehnin began making bricks in 1462 and how the industry grew until the 1880s. During Berlin’s rapid expansion after 1871, Glindow sent an estimated twenty-two billion bricks to the capital. When local clay pits ran out, the works turned to flower pots until the 1980s. Today the museum keeps these stories alive with documents, photographs and tools that explain the workers’ lives and the owners’ fortunes. Visitors walk through the tower’s exhibition rooms and then into the working brickworks. A Hoffmann ring kiln, still intact, demonstrates how bricks are fired in the traditional way. Guided tours let people see hand-strung bricks and special shaped tiles being made for restoring historic buildings. Outside, the Glindower Alpen, once clay heaps, are now a nature reserve with paths and a teaching trail.