Allard Pierson Museum & Special Collections

The present year will be marked by a notable programme of temporary exhibitions. Furthermore the Museum's renewal will be made more concrete, a process for which the Friends of the Allard Pierson Museum are greatly needed and in which they will continue to be closely ...

Until recently cultural planning was a term used to refer to a relatively new field of policy that had come into vogue since the Belvedere Policy Document. Since the Spatial Planning Memorandum (2006) this term has been deleted from policy idiom and replaced by the term 'spatial quality’.

The term cultural planning and now spatial quality is regarded as the universal remedy brought forward from the Belvedere point of view since 1999. But does a workable framework providing insight into an integral vision actually exist? It requires more than just a joint motto (conservation through development) and also more than joint projects.

In the first place, it requires that the worlds of cultural history and of the planners and designers communicate with each other in an unambiguous manner. As pointed out before, the concept of cultural history is a rather vague and defenceless concept without any formulation of the problems.

If we add up the gaps and lacks, there is too little attention on either side for the totality of objects and occurrences of acting man on the level of the historical town centre. Even though a house, a street or a building block has been torn down and even though the residents have moved or died, there is still a memory that may be the basis of a recollection related to such a place, such a building location. The odd thing is that archaeological traces - usually destroyed because of a new building plan - may demonstrate this quite concretely, while historical sources are also present, but all too often remain invisible.

The added value of multidisciplinary research into a historical town centre chiefly lies in relating research into the spatial-physical aspect on the one hand to the social-cultural aspect on the other. By linking this to a long-term perspective as well, more insight will be gained into the stratification and the various speeds at which processes are taking place. In addition, the step between research and design should also get more attention.

Consequently, the most important recommendations are relatively simple and refer to two things. In the first place, it concerns professionals, so both from the world of cultural history and from spatial planning, who wish to start the discussion on tradition and renovation in a historical town centre. In this respect it is crucial that both the spatial-physical aspect and the social-cultural aspect are taken into consideration and combined as much as possible, for they cannot exist independently. Obviously, this requires much effort from researchers, designers and more attention should be paid to it, notably in current training.

In the second place, this discussion should also get a formal context. In my opinion this can best be done by including a cultural-historical paragraph in the zoning plan by means of which cultural-historical research - at any rate in protected village and urban conservation areas - can be enforced if building permits and demolition permits are at issue. By analogy with archaeology legislation this multidisciplinary research should also acquire a legal basis.

CERAMICS FROM A CESSPIT BELONGING TO THE INN 'DE DRYE MOOREN' AT BREDA (1661-1663)
The cesspit was discovered during the restoration of a Breda house called 'De Drye Mooren', 'The Three Moors'. During the 17th century an inn was kept in the house, which was owned by the Breda Reformed Church and its 'Table of the Holy Ghost' (poor relief) from 1626 to 1703. In the church wardens accounts repairs and extensions to the building are mentioned. In the year 1663 the house was extended backwards. The outer wall of this extention closed the cesspit. That fact provides a datum ante quem. From the same accounts it appears that the pit was cleaned regularly, the last time before 1663 being after October lOth, 1661, the datum post quem. Apart from a small number of objects left behind by the cleaners, the vast majority of the objects must have been dumped between late 1661 and sometime during 1663.
As it is very likely that ceramic objects of an inn generally have a shorter lifespan than those from an ordinary household, many of the objects found were not much older than 1660. The numerous remains of the extremely fragile clay pipes is another corroboration of this dating. Of the 85 pipe bowls 49 bear marks, many of them of known local pipemakers.
The differentiation in pottery types found in the cesspit is rather typical for an inn: 50 out of 137 ceramic items were plates of one kind or another, 84 drinking glasses were counted (not published here), but only 11 pipkins. The number of stoneware jugs is not very large (13) which suggests that pewter jugs were used more frequently; an inventory of 1678 bears out this suggestion. In percentages: 70% of the pottery was used on the table, only 14% in the kitchen.

These eleven glass negatives were made by the 'wet collodium process', a photographic technique introduces in 1851. Their sizes also point ot production in the middle of the ninetheenth century. The picture from teh Forum Romanum can be dated to the spring of 1855 when young trees were planted along the Via Sacra. The photos were taken around the Capitol and a house (the photographer's?). Based on the technique, date and format, photographic quality and locations, the negatives have been attributed to the French photographer and painter Eugene Constant. He worked from 1848 to 1855 in Rome as photographer, and these photographs are probalby the last the took there. Apparently they were not meant for the market, and prints of the negatives are so far unknown, which makes it all the more mysterious how the box ended up in Amsterdam.

Wat is cultuurhistorie? Enerzijds zijn dit de roerende en onroerende erfgoedcategorieën die via de Monumentenwetgeving kunnen worden beschermd. Anderzijds gaat het om sociaal-culturele aspecten (immaterieel erfgoed) en dat is veel lastiger te vatten. En dat gaat soms mis, vindt Wim Hupperetz, zoals bij de haven van Breda.