Turning the tide

Originally published in Travel Trade Gazette as "Time to go Dutch?" (p.56 of digital edition) on 11/03/11

Most people think they know what Amsterdam and the Netherlands are about, but these perceptions are built on little more than lazy stereotypes, as Ian Shine found out on a Unesco World Heritage Sites trip with the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions

Say “Amsterdam” to most people and they immediately think of “coffee shops” and the red light district, but the reality is that both make up an ever-shrinking proportion of a city steeped in history.

An initiative called Project 1012 will see 40% of the city’s brothels by 2014, while 26 of its coffee shops are also earmarked for closure.

Such re-invention is nothing new for the Dutch, who have been at the forefront of innovation in so many fields for the past 500 years - from their Golden Age of painters in the 17^th century to their “total football” of the early 1970s, but most notably in their architecture and town planning.

Many of The Netherlands’ nine Unesco World Heritage Sites reflect this, as I found out when I visited three of them.

Seventeenth-century canal ring

What Unesco says: “A masterpiece of hydraulic engineering and town planning. Testimony to a significant period in the history of the modern world.”

What it is: Three huge canals that wrap around the south and west of Amsterdam’s central old town, constructed when the Dutch realised around 1600 that they needed to expand the city to house its increasing population. Not that interesting perhaps, but what happened next had a profound influence on how the rest of the world would be put together over the next 300 years, as Piet van Winden, director of the canals’ forthcoming Het Grachtenhuis museum, explains to me.

“Instead of destroying the city and creating a new one [as was common practice] they drained swampland and built something new around the city,” he says.

What remains is a grand canal city in the spirit of Venice and St Petersburg, packed with elaborate but skinny houses (taxes were levied according to width of canal front taken up). The grandest of these are on Herengracht (Gentlemen’s Canal), which is nearest to the old town, and the swankiest of those are found on “the golden bend” directly south of the old town between Leidsestraat and Vijzelstraat.

The new Het Grachtenhuis museum, due to open on April 1, is styling itself as a “gateway” to the canal ring with interactive exhibitions ­-­­ including a room where visitors experience city views as if from the bottom of the canal ­- providing an overview of the area and its history. It will be located in a restored mansion at Herengracht 386.

Who will fancy it: Older culture-heads who like Venice, St Petersburg or Prague, and shopping addicts of any age who will love the boutique “nine streets” shopping district locked inside the canal ring.

Rietveld Schroder House

What Unesco says: ”An icon of the modern movement in architecture and an outstanding expression of human creative genius in its purity of ideas and concepts.”

What it is: A somewhat sci-fi house built by Gerrit Rietveld in 1924 and located in Utrecht, an easy 30-minute train ride from Amsterdam. Its simple horizontal planes, stark whites and primary colours represented a radical architectural move that is still cutting edge today. Comissioned by Mrs Truus Schroder-Schrader, who wanted a house where the boundaries between rooms and interior and exteriors were less defined, the upstairs features completely movable walls and windows that fold out of the house, as well as wacky but practical space and time-saving contraptions, such as a handle to close a downstairs door from upstairs. The house looks like a Mondrian painting and embodies the concepts of the De Stijl art movement. It is now a museum that really has to be seen to be believed.

It contains Rietveld’s famous and surprisingly comfy red and blue chair, a copy of which can tried out on the top floor of the Centraal Museum Utrecht.

Who will fancy it: Younger, trendy types who might like The White Stripes (their second album was called De Stijl and lead singer Jack White is a fan of Rietveld) or anyone interested in cultural breaks.

Beemster Polder

What Unesco says: “Innovative and intellectually imaginative landscape. Had a profound and lasting impact on reclamation projects in Europe and beyond.”

What it is: Essentially the bottom of a former lake that has been drained and turned into an inhabitable area which sits below sea level around thirty miles north of Amsterdam.

Like the canal ring, Beemster was developed in the 17^th century thanks to Dutch innovation that used windmills to pump the lake water into newly built canals. The area is full of picturesque pyramidal houses that were designed as such to allow farmers to store mounds of hay in the roof, although new houses in the area are still built this way.

It’s like a tranquil paradise here, barely a soul about, and there is a hint of the otherworldy about its openness. “God created the world but the Dutch made their own land,” says my guide, Fleur Brouwers. Maybe they even got one up on him, I think.

The Beemster is also great for admiring fields of tulips, which reach their best in mid-April, and its attractiveness and flatness make it ideal for cyclists.

Bikes are easy to hire in the Netherlands, with many hotels offering them along with specialist hire shops. As Fleur says of the Dutch, “we have more bikes than we do inhabitants”.

Who will fancy it: People who like cycling or walking holidays or just getting away from it all amid tranquil surroundings.

Life and its crises

Book review: Michael Cunningham - By Nightfall

Michael Cunningham is renowned for a spare prose style that is very much in evidence in "By Nightfall", but this book is notable for much more than its style.

As much scattered with esoteric literary and artistic references - from the "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" of Joyce's "Ulysses" to sexual desire in Thomas Mann's novels; Bruegel's "Fall of Icarus" to Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" - as it is saturated with the minutiae of everyday life and emotion, and the world's current economic climate.

The story follows the tribulations of Peter and Rebecca Harris - an art dealer and an editor - who have been married for 20-odd years. Rebecca's troubled and much-younger brother, Ethan (aka Mizzy) comes to stay with them, and when Peter accidentally sees Mizzy naked in the shower, mistaking him for Rebecca through the steam of the bathroom, the mid-life crisis that has been niggling at him throughout the book is given an injection of sexually-led pace. Peter's obsession with Mizzy and his sexuality slowly build (I won't reveal details for fear of ruining anybody's reading) to a crescendo near the end of the book, but the real story here is three people going through crises while the world goes through its own crisis around them.

Mizzy is one of life's wanderers: a perpetual quitter with no specific goal in life and an on-off drug habit to cope with. Now in his early 20s, the realisation of his adulthood casts him into the first real crisis of his carefree life.

Meanwhile, Rebecca's magazine is on the edge of bankruptcy and is only able to survive by allowing a morally questionable takeover. Thrown on top of her job fears is her shaky relationship with Peter, which often leads to tense face-offs in taxis home from parties or in bed either side of sleep.

Another major thread of the book is the world recession, and how affluent people like Peter and Rebecca rarely feel sincerely guilty about living a life beyond the means of so many other Americans. Living in something of a bubble, unaffected by the recession - Peter sells a bronze urn covered in obscenities to an art collector for an unstated but no doubt obscene amount of money -- the couple only really come into contact with the fears of the masses when Rebecca's job briefly looks like it could be uncertain.

Peter occasionally remarks that he doesn't like to look like he's dressing to smartly, and he tries to take trains rather than cabs to see clients - not because he's financially obliged to, but because he doesn't want to make the wrong impression on impoverished artists whose work he wants to sell.

All of the crises bubble on as the book ends, just as the financial crisis we're all facing in 2011 hasn't reached a conclusion yet. Big things happen to all the main characters in this book, all of their worlds are shifted by events within the pages of the novel, but Cunningham takes Peter, Rebecca and Mizzy from us before we can see where their crisis-hit lives will lead them.

An eloquent book, and one absolutely drenched in the upheaval of the early 21st century. It's destined for university reading lists of twenty or thirty years' time, and it's very possibly "The Great Gatsby" of this century.