Lombok

Plenty of Dutch neighbourhoods are named after a colonial war. Few are as direct about it as this one. When Utrecht began building on the land behind the railway in the eighteen-nineties, the council chose street names from the Dutch East Indies: Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Bali, Riouw and Lombok, all fixed between 1892 and 1895.

In 1894 the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army sailed for the island of Lombok on a punitive expedition. Soldiers gathered at the barracks on the Croeselaan and the Mineurslaan, a short walk from here, before they left. The outcome sent the country into a patriotic rush, and Utrecht ran one of the largest committees in the Netherlands collecting money for it. By around 1900 the name of a single street had spread across the entire neighbourhood.

What happened on Lombok itself dropped out of view for a long time. The street names are still here, and people have been arguing about them since the nineteen-eighties.

In those same years the top end of the neighbourhood faced demolition. Longtime residents and recently arrived guest workers resisted together, behind a slogan saying they would decide for themselves what happened here. The houses stayed.

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