Hannover's western edge is mostly rail yards, canal bank and green fringe, and it tells the city's industrial story more honestly than the old town does. The Mittelland Canal, the long artificial waterway that links the Rhine and the Elbe, passes near Seelze, and barges move quietly along it all day, a calm, almost hypnotic sight. The Leine river is close too, with its wide floodplain, and the city's factories once clustered along both.
Hannover has long made things. The tyre company Continental was founded here in 1871, and the biscuit maker Bahlsen, famous for its Leibniz biscuits, has been in the city since the nineteenth century. This part of the city has little of the polished charm of the centre, but it has a gritty authenticity, and it is where many locals live and work. Ronnenberg and Seelze are practical towns, with shops, stations, and the ordinary bustle of commuter life.
For a rider, the beauty is in leaving. In half an hour the suburban ring thins, and you reach farmland and the long, wooded ridge of the Deister, whose slopes the road climbs and descends in a series of gentle bends. The Weserbergland beyond, with its half-timbered villages and quiet valleys, is the real destination, and the route is a sweep through it, along minor roads that follow rivers and cross wooded hills. The Weser itself is wide and slow, a typical north German river.
Traffic is the issue on the edge of the city, with its junctions, traffic lights and slow commuters, so start early on a weekday or on a quiet Sunday. Fuel is not a concern, with plenty of stations and a supermarket on every corner, and Seelze, with some thirty-three thousand people, has all you need. Fill up here, because the hills have fewer pumps. A bakery coffee and a quick check of the tyre pressure, and you are away to the south-west.