Travelling through the northern Dutch university town of Groningen the other day I chanced to encounter a handsome modern museum built on the canal. Rather more surprising, on the other side of town there lurks an underground multi-storey car park which I can only describe as beautiful.
It consists of a spiral, one track down, one track up, with a single row of parking spaces on either side and, wait for it, brightly lit by a triangular blue light, one per car. Superior elevator music wafts through the car park and from somewhere below when we parked there came a source of pink light which further softened this normally harsh public space.
It turned out to come from a brightly-lit art work on display at the bottom of the spiral and (the Gloucester Rd Tube station in west London has a similar arrangement) regularly changed. ”We’ve won prizes,” the parking attendant explained in the excellent English one quickly comes to expect from Dutch waitresses, shop assistants and the policeman who had politely told me I was obstructing the traffic the previous day.
What were we doing in Holland in August, let alone so far from cosmopolitan Amsterdam? Unlike some friends my wife and I have no desire to go big game hunting, even with a camera, and we love the sea while disliking the beach. More adventurous than me, she was in a mini-van on the Hindu Kush on 9/11 (I was in the office). We either travel or we go to France, not an option this year.
So the plan was “Calais and turn left”: to drift across Northern Europe with a tent in the back of the car (just in case) and see how far we might get; inspecting places nearer to home than the Hindu Kush which get unfairly neglected, incidentally picking up new car-park insights and confirming what tyrants cyclists will be if they ever get to rule the world.
Places like never-previously visited Antwerp where Rubens’ lovely old home bears eloquent witness to the great artist as a man of business, unlike poor Rembrandt, the miller’s son who went bankrupt up the road in Holland.
Places like Delft, where the old-town network of canals and pretty houses, the legacy of medieval and early modern wealth, is as good as Bruges. (I cannot report on its churches. It being Sunday, they seemed to be shut.)
We avoided Amsterdam, where we honeymooned long ago, and went instead to the Hague, an impressive blend of ancient and ultra-modern. In the brilliant Mauritzhaus gallery the star of the show these days is the Girl with a Pearl Ear Ring by the long-unfashionable Vemeer. How fickle artistic taste can be! But the eye-catcher for me is Jean Fouquet’s (1420-80) Madonna and Child, a striking composition in red, white and blue, severe but sensual. How did that manage to get painted before the 20th century, let alone survive so long? If you know, tell me.
As we drift north through the densely-populated central belt, the Dutch west coast as crowded as Florida in its own way, we are engulfed by the orderly and attractive calm of the Netherlands and its people. If there is a looming crisis over the country’s identity it is on holiday in August. I only hear a car horn once, someone helpfully warning me not to go down a one-way street.
Apart from the mighty 32 km dam (I had always wantd to drive across it) which finally closed the Zuider Zee to flooding in 1932, two striking physical manifestations of this ordered calm are homes and bikes.
The Dutch genius for domestic architecture has survived the 20th century. Compact, neat homes, usually in brick, surrounded by flourishing gardens, predominate and many winding surburban streets seem little wider than lanes. Their dolls house quality is smugly attractive. There is wealth too, albeit more discreet than ours. But what must be social housing is also well designed and cared for, rarely more than four storeys high with tended gardens, always a good sign.
As for bicycle culture I had forgotten how pervasive it is, so much so that it spreads into Germany. All right, Holland is flat, which helps. But so are parts of Britain and its towns. Where did you last see 500 bikes chained up outside a commuter station? It must feel safer with so many cycle paths and lanes on the roads. Safer for the bikers, that is.
If you are an unwary pedestrian, unaware of Dutch biker protocols as you study a map astride a designated cycle lane, you take your life in your hands since everyone seems to cycle fast (except the over-80s who don’t have the puff), confident of their rights. In most town centres we visited, cars have to defer.
As a London biker myself I have mixed feelings about this. There are no boy racers with fancy drop handlebars, aero-dynamic lycra shorts and 50 gears to help them hurtle through traffic lights, as we have at home. Quite the reverse: Dutch bikers will patiently stare at a red light on an empty crossing for 3 minutes.
But many of them do seem a little overbearing and brush your back at high speed on the pavements we all have to share. When you accidently force them to swerve or even stop, heaven forbid, they can be quite cross. Being Dutch this never goes beyond a single cry or a severe “Tssskk”. If they are like this with feeble pedestrians, imagine what they might do to cars if a Calvinistic coalition of Green Bikers ever won power?
But these are good people who tamed the sea at home and roamed the world on it. It is not just National Car Parks which has much to learn from them.
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