The market square and town hall

Welcome to this walk through Middelburg, the capital of the Zeeland province in the southwest of the Netherlands. It was once the second-busiest trading city in the Dutch Republic after Amsterdam, and today it's known above all for its historic buildings, more than twelve hundred of them. That's no shortage of stories.

On this walk we explore the city in a slightly different way. We pass the famous spots, because they've earned it, but what we really talk about are the things that are no longer here to see. A church that disappeared, a prison that became a garden, a street that was never the same after one night in May 1940. Middelburg is a city you only really understand once you know what's gone.

My name is Paul, and I'll be your company today. We start on the Markt, and that's already one of those places, because this square only exists because a church was torn down to create it. Until 1575, the Westmonsterkerk stood here, the oldest church on the island of Walcheren and for centuries the mother parish of all the surrounding islands. Paving over the gap it left behind took 314,800 cobblestones.

So the town hall we're looking at is actually older than the square in front of it. The Flemish master builder family Keldermans started work on it in 1452, and when the German painter Albrecht Dürer passed through Middelburg in 1520, he noted in his journal that he had seen a remarkably fine town hall here, with a beautiful tower. That it's still standing today is less straightforward than it looks, because on 17 May 1940 the building burned out completely and only the outer walls survived.

High on the facade, above the sundial, there's a Madonna and child. She was added during the restoration that began in 1884, led by Pierre Cuypers, at that time the most celebrated architect in the Netherlands and the man behind the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam Centraal station. Cuypers was Catholic in a country that had been governed as Protestant for centuries, and he gave his Madonna the facial features of Queen Wilhelmina, with the young Princess Juliana on her lap. Nobody has ever taken it down.

We walk along the front of the town hall to the left and go around the building on that side. Behind the town hall we come out onto a small square, and that's where we stop.