Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Dutch architecture


My daughter Rosie was recently talking to me about how much more innovative new housing is in Holland compared with the pseudo tudor/victorian/georgian housing estates in the UK. Today in the Paleiskwartie near the central station in den Bosch I saw what she meant. The Dutch have great respect for their historic buildings, but they don't try and reproduce them.
BTW den Bosch is one of those Dutch cities with two names (there are two of them). It is also called
's Hertegenbosch. Lindsey tells me the 's' is an abbreviationof 'des', the old-fashioned possessive form, meaning 'of the'. The word'Hertog' means 'duke', the plural being 'Hertogen' , and 'bosch' is the old spelling for 'bos', meaning 'a wood' . Originally it was a settlement close to a wood belonging to the Dukes of Brabant.

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