Garden houses within the ramparts of Enkhuizen

The last remnants of a green town

Abstract

In 1592, the Enkhuizen town council decided to develop a sizeable urban expansion. As luck would have it, the growth that had justified that decision soon started to falter and the city entered a long period of decline  accompanied by a shrinking population. A growing number of empty plots appeared in both the old and new areas of the city. Over time, and especially in the 1592 extension, those empty plots were filled, not by houses, but by pleasure gardens, vegetable gardens and orchards. By the early nineteenth century there remained only a few streets of close-knit housing; large parts of the town were almost uninhabited.

Probably from the seventeenth century onwards, a special type of garden house emerged in those abandoned or never developed streets: very shallow houses running the full width of the plot on which they stood formed a tall screen in front of the city gardens. Most of these ‘garden houses’ had a backwards-sloping lean-toroof. Such uninterrupted street frontages defined the streetscape of the uninhabited districts. The summer-houses fronting pleasure gardens had one or two bay windows, which are still known in Enkhuizen as ‘koepels’ (domes). The less fortunate inhabitants of Enkhuizen had corresponding, but simpler garden houses, sometimes made of wood. They used their gardens and orchards to grow their own vegetables and fruit; such crops probably made an important contribution to their livelihood. Only a few of these garden houses have survived, while still others are known only through old photographs. From the oldest cadastral map we learn that these houses are  representative of the garden house architecture that occupied large parts of Enkhuizen until the beginning of the twentieth century. The level of population decline experienced by Enkhuizen was unique in both the Netherlands and Europe as a whole. Although this type of garden houses was probably a genuine local phenomenon, there were similar developments later on in some other cities, including Amsterdam, where in 1682 a special garden district, the Plantage, was laid out.