Stand across the railway tracks and look at the Fagus works, and you are looking at one of the buildings where modern architecture started. In 1911 the shoe-last maker Carl Benscheidt hired a young Walter Gropius and his partner Adolf Meyer to design a new factory in Alfeld, in the Leine valley of Lower Saxony. They gave it walls of glass that seem to wrap around the corners with no column to hold them, a radical trick at the time, and the result was so influential that it became a UNESCO site in 2011. The best part: it is still a working factory making shoe lasts, not a museum frozen in place.
Benscheidt placed his showpiece facing the railway on purpose, so every passenger on the line between Hanover and Göttingen would see it as an advertisement. There is a visitor centre and exhibition in one of the old buildings, covering Gropius, the Bauhaus that he went on to found, and the craft of carving lasts from beech wood, which is where the name Fagus, Latin for beech, comes from. Allow an hour and you will see the glass curtain wall with new eyes.
Alfeld itself is a modest market town of around nineteen thousand people with a half-timbered centre, a tall church and a historic Latin school, and it has fuel, supermarkets and the usual cafés. The surrounding Leinebergland is the real draw for riding: forested ridges such as the Sieben Berge, the Hils and the Sackwald rise around the valley, and the roads between villages like Delligsen and Freden twist through beech woods and over little saddles with views over fields of rapeseed and wheat. Surfaces are generally good, traffic light outside rush hour, and the weather typically mild but changeable, so pack a rain layer even in summer.
From here it is a short hop to the Weser Uplands and the Solling to the west, or east to the Harz, with Goslar and the Rammelsberg mine that one of the rides links in. Hildesheim, with its Romanesque churches, is about thirty kilometres north. If you only have a few minutes, stop where the road crosses the railway, look at those corners of glass with the afternoon sun behind them, and remember that a shoe-last factory in a small country town changed the way the whole world builds.