Vondelstraat: Vondelkerk & Hollandsche Manege

Why is it significant?

Stand on Vondelstraat and look at two neighbours that could hardly be more different. On one side, a brick spire with pointed windows and buttresses, as if a medieval church had wandered into a nineteenth-century street and decided to stay.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on Vondelstraat and look at two neighbours that could hardly be more different. On one side, a brick spire with pointed windows and buttresses, as if a medieval church had wandered into a nineteenth-century street and decided to stay. A few doors further on, an ordinary looking street front with a passage... and drifting out of it, the smell of hay and leather.

The church is the Vondelkerk, designed by Pierre Cuypers, the most important Dutch architect of his day, who also gave Amsterdam the Rijksmuseum and Centraal Station. For two centuries after the Reformation, Amsterdam's Catholics had worshipped in hidden churches behind ordinary house fronts. Only after their bishops were restored in 1853 could they build openly again, and this church, begun in 1872, took until 1880 to finish because the money kept running out.

Not everyone loved Cuypers' Gothic taste. Protestant critics sneered that his Rijksmuseum looked like an archbishop's palace, and the story goes that King William the Third refused to set foot inside. In 1904 a fire destroyed this church's original tower, and his son Joseph designed the one you see now. Closed as a church in the 1970s, it narrowly escaped demolition and lives on as a venue for concerts and events.

Now follow the passage to the neighbour. Behind the street front hides a lofty hall of cast iron and glass, with sand on the floor and a horse circling slowly beneath the arches. This is the Hollandsche Manege, a riding school founded in 1744, the oldest in the Netherlands. Its hall opened in 1882, designed by Adolf Leonard van Gendt, who took the Spanish Riding School in Vienna as his model. Hold on to his name: six years later he finished another building on this walk, one with a very different sound inside.

Why a riding school here? Because the Vondelpark was laid out for horses as much as for people, with bridle paths among the trees, and a Sunday ride was the height of fashion for the families moving into these streets. When cars replaced carriages the hall was nearly lost too, and in the 1980s it had to be saved from demolition. It still teaches riding today. Now step back into the park, and find the poet himself on his tall pedestal.