Zocher and the Singel Park

This water protected the city for five hundred years and then nearly finished it off.

Until the nineteenth century there was a rampart here, with walls, gates and bastions. Once the New Dutch Waterline was built east of the city that rampart lost its military purpose, and around 1830 the whole thing came down. What remained was an empty strip around the old centre, and the question of what to do with it.

Jan David Zocher junior turned it into a park. No straight avenues but winding paths, stretches of water and groups of trees that keep sending your eye somewhere else, in the English landscape style that was coming into fashion. He was handed a bare strip of ground where a fortress had stood and made something of it that nobody had asked for. Many of the trees you see here are his.

A century and a half later it nearly went wrong. In the nineteen seventies this stretch was filled in for a four-lane road to the new shopping centre, under a kilometre long and therefore the shortest motorway in the country. The city got traffic jams and concrete in return.

In 2020 the water was reconnected. For the first time in fifty years you could sail right around the city again, and the park has been restored in the spirit of Zocher's design.

The bastion you pass if you walk the history route of this city is exactly such a leftover. That walk starts there.

This one ends here. You have met nine people from Utrecht, and not one of them did what was expected of them.