The Netherlands - Part 2 Great Continental Railway Journeys

I'm embarking on a new railway adventure that will take

me across the heart of Europe.

I'll be using this, my Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide,

dated 1913, which opened up an exotic world of foreign

travel for the British tourist.

It told travellers where to go, what to see, and how to navigate

the thousands of miles of tracks criss-crossing the Continent.

Now a century later I'm using my copy to reveal an

era of great optimism and energy, where technology, industry,

science and the arts were flourishing.

I want to rediscover that lost Europe,

that in 1913 couldn't know that its

way of life would shortly be swept aside by the advent of war.

TRAIN SPEEDS PAST

I'm continuing a tour of the Netherlands,

following my 1913 guide.

I began in Rotterdam and have travelled to the nation's

political centre, The Hague.

From there my route continues north-east towards the historic

town of Haarlem, before reaching the metropolis of Amsterdam.

I'll finish my journey in the geographical heart of the country, Utrecht.

Along the way, I root around the world's largest flower auction...

Tell me there are some rules here, right?

There are some rules of the road, are there?

Well, they say they have traffic rules.

'..discover the story of the Dutch Golden Age...'

Amsterdam was the Dubai of the 17th century.

'..and tackle a fusion banquet from the age of Empire.'

-Oh.

-OK.

-HE CLAPS

-There you go.

-Thank you.

-Enjoy.

THEY LAUGH

My next stop will be Haarlem.

The guidebook says that it's "a pleasant, clean,

"thriving town, the centre of a famous horticultural district,

"whence bulbs, hyacinths, tulips, crocuses,

"lilies etc are exported all over Europe."

The Dutch really are mad about their blooms.

Flower-potty.

This is Holland's bulb belt, and since the early 20th century

it's been the hub of the global flower trade.

This handsome Art Nouveau railway station, decorated with tiles,

opened in 1908.

Haarlem to me has been a wonderful surprise.

Full of these tiny streets with brick-built gabled houses.

Really pretty.

One of the chief attractions of the Netherlands for tourists

in 1913 was its picture galleries, full of works by old Dutch masters.

In the Golden Age, it wasn't just the Dutch economy that flourished.

Riches flowed into culture, particularly painting.

Bradshaw's tells me most of the larger towns possess valuable

collections of paintings.

Including some of world renown.

Here in Haarlem there's a painting with a story to tell,

of the pitfalls of rampant capitalism.

In recent history we experienced the dot-com boom.

Frantic speculation in an item until a bubble was created,

and when it burst it brought bankruptcy to many.

Well, in 17th-century Holland,

a similar thing happened and the commodity involved was tulip bulbs.

The painter, Jan Brueghel the Younger,

satirises the speculators as brainless monkeys.

And here, in the boom times,

a tulip appears to be worth as much as a bag of gold.

But then the crash comes.

And here is a ruined monkey clutching a worthless share

certificate, urinating on the tulips that brought his downfall.

From riches to rags.

A morality tale.

Despite the crash, the flower industry continued to blossom.

In the year before my guide book was published, dedicated auction houses

were set up in nearby Aalsmeer to cope with the growing trade.

But today it's no monkey business.

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

I find myself in the middle of a flower auction here.

They're selling hortensias and viburnums and tulips.

It's a Dutch auction, so the price begins high and falls,

and you bid as it falls.

Speed is of the essence.

In as little as ten days these blooms will be worthless.

Timing is everything.

Wait too long to bid and you run the risk of losing out entirely.

But the whole thing here takes only about a second.

And I'm sitting here kind of terrified that if I touch my mouse

I'll end up with a whole bunch of flowers.

The purchased flowers immediately make their way to their new

owners via the distribution area.

I think this is the biggest building I've ever been in in my life.

It's like several huge railway stations put together.

And I say that because I'm looking down on lots of flower trains,

but whereas at a station they'd run in parallel lines,

here they're crossing each other, higgledy-piggledy.

It looks like chaos.

And it's very impressive.

Amazingly, this complex has a footprint roughly the size of

the Principality of Monaco.

-Hello!

-Good morning!

-Good morning! I'm Michael.

-Hi. I'm Josie.

'Josie is going to help me to find my way out.'

Tell me there are some rules here, right? There are some rules of the road, are there?

Well, they say they have traffic rules.

Sometimes I'm doubtful about them.

This is such fun.

Obviously I'm amazed by the size of the building.

What is the scale of this operation?

Every day we auction off 21 million stacks of flowers

and two million potted plants.

And, as you can see, quite a hectic business.

From here flowers are exported across the globe.

Everything what you see here,

85% is leaving our border before midnight.

'Meaning that a bunch of roses can go from soil to

'a sitting room as far away as New York City in just 48 hours.'

-Oh!

-Oh, you made it!

MICHAEL LAUGHS

-Ah, thank you.

-You're welcome.

The whole operation is flourishing.

My journey continues towards Amsterdam,

following the route of the first railway line in the Netherlands.

Opened in September 1839,

this nearly ten-mile stretch of track proved that it was possible

to construct railways in this marshy terrain.

Unlike many early railways,

this line was built specifically for passengers rather than freight.

For the Dutch, masters of the waters,

cargo would continue to arrive in Amsterdam by ship.

I shall soon be in Amsterdam.

The guide book tells me that it's situated at the confluence of the Rivers Amstel and Wye.

That it's the commercial capital of Holland.

Most of the Dutch colonial produce is dealt with in Amsterdam.

With colonial and trading interests that encompassed present-day Indonesia,

Connecticut and New York City,

which was once known as New Amsterdam, in a Golden Age,

the riches that flowed into Old Amsterdam were without compare.

And the magnificent Amsterdam Centraal Station celebrates

that imperial power.

From the outset the Dutch railway network was funded by the

huge revenues generated by the country's Empire.

I've made my way to the city's canal rig, to meet history

professor Geert Janssen from the University of Amsterdam.

-Hello, Geert.

-Hi, Michael.

-Wonderful location.

-It's beautiful, yeah.

We're meeting in the very heart of the old city.

what was attracting tourists to Amsterdam 100 years ago, do you think?

I think 100 years ago people came to Amsterdam to enjoy and

to appreciate the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century.

Amsterdam didn't get a typical 19th-century facelift

that was typical of London and Paris in this period,

so in Amsterdam you could still see and enjoy

a city that had kept its 17th-century character.

What can Amsterdam have been like at the height of the Golden Age?

It's the Dubai of the 17th century.

Amsterdam attracted a variety of different people from all over Europe.

A great number of what we would call labour migrants from the

German Empire, from France, from the British Isles,

as well as religious refugees,

so people who had been persecuted elsewhere in Europe who were

attracted to the Dutch Republic for its religious tolerance as well

as Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews from the Iberian peninsula

and Eastern Europe,

so it was very much a mixed and cosmopolitan city at the time.

Same old story. MICHAEL LAUGHS

Yeah, it is.

I look forward to exploring this cosmopolitan capital tomorrow,

using the eyes of yesterday's tourist.

The canals of Amsterdam are delightfully free from

tourists at this time of the morning, and indeed the Doolin Hotel

was advertised in Bradshaw's as being "free from tram noise."

I'm tucking into a Dutch breakfast of poffertjes.

Little thick pancakes served with - wait for it -

butter and powdered sugar.

And here at the Doolin they're served with sparkling wine.

Another reason why this place might have been popular 100 years ago.

By 1913, Amsterdam had been the hub of

a global trading network for four centuries.

And this area, De Wallen, is still the centre for age-old transactions.

The Oude Kerk, or Old Church,

according to Bradshaw's dates back to 1300.

But these are windows not into men's souls,

but rather to display ladies of the night.

And I'm interested to know how it is that this bastion,

first of Catholicism and then of Protestantism, is co-located with

what is now probably the world's most famous red-light district.

De Wallen once straddled Amsterdam's busy shipping port.

The port has since moved, but prostitution hasn't.

And today the oldest profession is legal.

For many modern tourists, Amsterdam's red-light district

confirms its reputation as both sin city and progressive utopia.

I'm having a coffee with Annemarie de Wildt,

curator of the Amsterdam Museum...

-Hello, Annemarie.

-Hello.

-I'm Michael.

..to find out how this curious state of affairs came about.

-So, here we are. The church, red-light district...

-Yeah.

-..and kindergarten.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, some people would say, "Only in Amsterdam."

Yeah, it's a good spot to talk about the famous tolerance of Amsterdam,

and the fact that we are able to have these very different

things coexist right next to each other.

Now, the Bradshaw traveller, coming here in 1913,

what legal position would he have found?

Prostitution was officially forbidden but, of course,

a harbour city like Amsterdam,

it's very difficult to ban it altogether, so it did exist.

There were officially no brothels, but he would have found maybe

women standing on the streets soliciting, or brothels

that were sort of in hiding, like a tobacco shop for instance.

In the 1960s, this started to change.

It became as open as it is now,

with women sitting in the windows.

In the decades following the sexual revolution of the 1960s,

the Dutch experimented with a policy known as gedogen, or tolerance.

Whilst still illegal, prostitution, like cannabis,

was officially tolerated.

Apparently, prostitution is legalised today in the Netherlands.

-Yes.

-When did that change occur?

Well, the change only occurred in 2000.

People are always very surprised about it

and after years and years and years of discussion,

the idea was, let's make rules, let's make regulations,

let's try and ban out the criminality

and see if we can make it into a normal job.

Is the legalisation controversial today?

It is a difficult subject.

There is still trafficking, there is still forced prostitution,

so now the city authorities, here and in other cities,

are trying to, not to get rid of it altogether,

but at least to make it smaller.

I'm leaving the red-light district

to explore the streets of south Amsterdam.

The biggest risk to life in the Netherlands is crossing the road.

Whoa!

First of all, there's a cycle lane.

Then there's two tracks of trams.

Four lanes of regular traffic

and then...don't forget, there's another cycle lane.

Made it.

One 19th-century invention, the railways,

still flourishes today.

Another 19th-century invention dominates the transport scene

in the Netherlands, even in the 21st century.

For which I will need some Dutch courage.

A park, a sunny day, a bicycle.

I haven't done anything this healthy in years.

In the Indies Neighbourhood in eastern Amsterdam,

many of the streets are named after the islands

of the Dutch East Indies, most of the present-day Indonesia.

That colony generated vast wealth

and one of the world's first fusion cuisines.

Thank you very much.

Sir, see.

This is our speciality rijsttafel.

-I'll have the rijsttafel, please.

-OK.

-Thank you very much.

Literally translated, rijsttafel means rice table.

Sounds like a simple enough meal.

All right, good, there we go.

Ah!

OK. There we go. Please.

-Thank you.

-Enjoy it.

Invented by the Dutch during their 350-year rule over Indonesia,

this feast combined local cuisine with a taste of home

and was designed to showcase the exotic abundance of the Empire.

I have never seen such a variety of food

and all of it fresh and delicious and brilliant ingredients.

I've got rices, I've got noodles, I've got soup,

I've got an omelette, I've got fish, a banana, beef,

beans, fresh vegetables, a kind of poppadom, nuts.

Oh! Delicious.

By 1913, Dutch tourists to the colonies had experienced this

Indo-Dutch cuisine first-hand and had imported it to the Netherlands.

And so an Edwardian traveller following my guidebook might

well have enjoyed a rijsttafel, too.

-Ah, chef.

-Hello, sir.

-Congratulations.

-Are you enjoying the rijsttafel?

I am enjoying it very much indeed.

If you don't finish it, it will be an insult for us.

-Oh, my goodness.

-So...

-I'll report back in about two hours.

OK, we'll see you then with dessert.

-No, please.

-Thank you.

Please, no-one offer me a wafer-thin mint.

I'm on the final leg of my tour of the Netherlands,

making my way south-east to the smallest Dutch province.

Thank you.

'And the centre of the country.'

My last stop will be Utrecht.

The guidebook tells me that the River Rhine here separates

into two streams, a Roman city and a very old place.

This brings me to the heart of the country,

to the hub of the railway network and, due to a treaty signed in 1579,

maybe to the origin of the Netherlands.

Thanks to its location,

Utrecht became the main hub of the Dutch railway network.

Today, its Centraal station is the busiest in the country.

More than 900 trains depart here everyday,

carrying nearly 200,000 passengers.

And they're preparing for it to get even busier.

Increasing capacity to cope with a predicted

100 million rail users a year by 2020.

Everywhere around me, there's crashing and banging and drilling.

Building works everywhere.

And I think, just now, the finishing touches are being put to it.

In 1913, though, Utrecht was a quiet place.

Bradshaw's talks of a pleasant city with promenades bordered by streams.

But over 300 years earlier,

it had been at the centre of a military alliance,

formed between the very different Dutch provinces

to resist their Spanish ruler.

Called the Union Of Utrecht,

it led to the formation of the Dutch Republic,

with a parliament at the Hague, and ushered in the Golden Age.

At the Cathedral of St Martin, known as the Dom,

I've arranged to meet historian Professor Maarten Prak...

-Hello, Maarten.

-Michael, how nice to meet you here.

..to find out more about that seminal moment in the formation

of the modern-day Netherlands.

Maarten, what is the significance for Dutch history of this

medieval chapel?

It was the place where, in January 1579,

a group of people put together and subsequently signed a document,

the Union of Utrecht,

that later came to be seen as the first constitution.

The foundational documents of the Netherlands.

Who participated, then, in signing this document?

Provinces, individual nobles, representatives of various towns,

a hodgepodge of people who were involved in a rebellion against the

King of Spain, who was the sovereign of this country at the time.

To cooperate militarily,

those disparate rebels had first to agree their differences.

There are two points in that document that were significant.

One was that they insisted on continuing

their local and regional autonomy.

As a result, the Dutch Republic

was a very disunited sort of country.

A Federation.

The other thing was that they decided to set up a religious order,

but at the same time ruled that each inhabitant privately

could believe what he or she wished to believe.

So religious toleration is virtually in the Dutch DNA.

Is there a connection with the tolerance today

of drugs and prostitution?

I think there is.

In the sense that from the very early days,

the Dutch learned to live with diversity.

And the whole idea of the Union of Utrecht,

and its article on religion, was that Catholics were a fact of life.

You couldn't move them somewhere else.

And the same is true for prostitution or drugs in

modern society.

You can't do away with it, so you have to deal with it.

This, I think, is what is known as...

Well, perhaps Dutch pragmatism.

It's not so much a principle, but it is a practice.

But what does pragmatism in practice look like?

Bradshaw's had led me to expect a city of handsome houses.

Following the union of Utrecht, the Netherlands was

a religiously tolerant place, but still the Catholics thought it

best to be discreet and to disguise their churches.

And where better to hide one than in one of the handsome houses?

And, completely unexpectedly, a gem of a church,

complete with organ and virgin and Christ, a couple of baroque bishops.

And a fully licensed bar,

but I think that was a more recent addition.

Thank you very much.

Cheers.

Cheers to you.

My Bradshaw's description of the Netherlands draws heavily on

its long and glorious history.

A century later, I've arranged to have a drink with some locals

to gauge how connected modern Dutch identity is to the nation's past.

And good health to you all.

-Proost.

-Proost.

-Oh, proost.

Proost, indeed. Proost, proost, proost, proost, proost.

Proost!

100 years ago, this was written.

"Holland, which was once an extended swamp,

"presents the picture of a people

"owing not only their wealth and high commercial position,

"but even the very land, to their own labour and enterprise."

Is that a fair assessment of the Dutch?

I think that's a defining feature of us. Yes.

We don't necessarily have to like each other,

but you have to cooperate because it's... In a delta, it's crucial.

But about this tolerance thing, is it true that the Dutch are tolerant?

I think there are a lot of different people living in the

Netherlands and everyone is just being him or herself and, you know,

it seems normal that there are different people and they feel...

Are OK with the fact that they have different religions

or different sexual preferences.

Tolerant, actually, is not a very nice word.

Tolerant means you put up with people.

What about respectful? Are the Dutch respectful?

Well, I'm not really a Dutch. I'm not really Dutch.

But, yes, absolutely.

I don't see tolerance as a nice word.

I see it as actually,

"You are strange and weird, but, OK, I'm going to accept that,

"as long as it doesn't cross my line."

Yes. And therefore, as an immigrant,

you are expected to respect their boundaries, too.

Absolutely. And I think it's just fair.

Now, marijuana.

What's going on?

And is it working?

That's great, my grandmother is watching.

But, erm...

Well, it's not legal in Holland.

It isn't illegal, either.

Especially, I hope, they're going to legalise the whole process

because I think it will cut crime rates.

And it's good for business, as well. And that's also typical Dutch.

-That's exactly what it is!

-So true.

That's the point about marijuana and tolerance.

-We see an economic benefit in it.

-Yes.

And I think we found out very early, in the early stages,

in the 17th century already,

that these people coming in, if you accept them, be tolerant,

that brings some economic benefits and we tend to like that.

So, ladies and gentlemen.

I give you a toast to Bradshaw's description of the Netherlands.

-Proost.

-Cheers! Proost!

You have to be impressed by Dutch history.

Starting with the Union of Utrecht,

they got rid of the mighty King of Spain.

With equal grit,

they built the dykes and windmills and drained the land.

A global empire flowered and persecuted religious dissidents

were attracted to cosmopolitan Amsterdam.

I'm as impressed by the architecture of that golden age

as the traveller was 100 years ago.

With the added feeling that

I'm visiting our national experiment in tolerance and moderation.