A Bitch That Needs To Be Tamed

The word, Gein, in Dutch, translates to English as "joke".

Amsterdam.  You shady bitch.

With the M53 now complete, it was time to head back out into the city's suburbs for the M50/M52 branch.  This was the final set of stations for me to collect to complete the entire Metro.

Gein, much like Gaasperplas, was on the edge of the city in every sense.  Once again I was out in a world of social housing and relative poverty, of immigrant stores and community centres.  The shopping street that extended from the station inland wasn't packed.  The main source of activity was the Jumbo supermarket, a chain I've always liked for its "does what it says on the tin" name - "yeah, we're a big supermarket, we're Jumbo, what's your problem?" Beyond it was a water feature with a small terrace lined with tables with chess sets inlaid in them.  The bird mess and general scratches decorating the black and white boards hinted that they maybe weren't used a lot.

From here, a footpath with a cycle route alongside took me through the estate to the next community along.  It was heavily shaded with trees and bushes, while the houses turned away from it, showing only their gable ends.  If this had been England I'd have been wary, waiting for muggers and rapists and murderers to leap out of the undergrowth.  Because I was abroad, everything had that glamorous patina of holiday, and I strolled along, thoroughly charmed, not thinking I could ever experience any kind of danger.  I sometimes worry that my sheer levels of stupidity are the only thing stopping me from being beaten to death, that psychopaths look at me and decide I'm actually too dumb to bother with.  I passed a bench where a large black man had a speaker system blasting out reggae music; next to him, on the same bench, a toothless man with a can of something in his hand (I'm guessing it wasn't sugar free Fanta) rolled around in a sitting dance.  The man with the speaker studiously ignored the person rocking out eight inches from his face; there may as well have been a forcefield between them.

Approaching the centre of Reigersbos, I was passed by a middle aged Asian couple.  He was bent over, a bag of groceries in his hand, while she wore a big floppy canvas hat and was carrying a gourd.  I'm not a biologist.  I know nothing of vegetables that you can't get from Sainsbury's Fruit & Veg aisle.  All I know is that this lady was carrying a foot long yellow fruit that could've been used as a weapon.

Reigersbos precinct was almost exactly the same as Gein.  Pink paving, a few shops, nothing you'd travel too far to visit.  1970s modernism with concrete and glass.  It did, however, have an architectural feature I found utterly thrilling.  There are some things that just appeal.  I like tilework.  I like steps.  I like symmetry.  I like pointless grandeur.  But one of my favourite things is transport going through the middle of a building.

It is, in many ways, dystopian, and I'm sure the people who live either side of the metro tunnels are furious several times an hour, but from down at street level it was unbelievably thrilling.  It was Gotham or Coruscant or Mega City One, and yes, I know none of those are exactly the ideal place to live, but it was still the future, and I loved it.  

Reigersbos station got a similar makeover to Ganzenhoef, except by that point the money was starting to run out.  The original 1970s building was demolished and replaced with a steel and glass version but there was none of the flourishes of Ganzenhoef, none of the charismatic moments.  It was a rebuild that felt more practical than artistic.

An interesting ("interesting") feature of Amsterdam's transport network is how late they were in building suburban railway stations.  I guess the idea was that Centraal was such an effective hub, with trams and buses radiating out from it, you didn't need silly little stops outside the city centre as well slowing things down.  It lead to strange situations like Holendrecht, where the metro station opened alongside the Amsterdam-Utrecht line in 1977, but they didn't build mainline platforms until 2008.  That's so weird to me.  Surely the more interchanges the better?

This might be a good time to broach the topic of the refurbishment.  You might have noticed, in the many, many sign selfies that I've taken, that the Oostlijn ones usually involve a red tiled frieze.  One like this:

These signs aren't original to the metro's construction.  In fact, they're newer than the Nord-Zuidlijn, having been installed between 2016 and 2019.  The Oostlijn's problems had continued beyond the riots that greeted its construction.  Drugs gripped the city throughout the 1980s, and the metro stations - dark spaces under viaducts with seats and lighting - became a prime spot for dealers and users alike to hang out.  A system of methadone buses introduced by the city's authorities to try and alleviate the problem made things worse, as they used the stations as convenient stopping points to treat addicts.  

Amsterdam was also being attacked by another problem: graffiti.  The original stations had been designed with ridged concrete walls which the architects proudly proclaimed would make it difficult to scribble on.  This was when the worst you could do was use chalk.  Unfortunately, spray paint suddenly became commonplace, and those ridged concrete walls became incredibly difficult to scrub clean.  The city eventually covered the walls up with drab panelling or a plasticised formulation to cut down on maintenance costs.  The lifts were enclosed metal boxes that people used as toilets, to the extent that some stations had cat litter scattered at the bottom of the shaft to absorb all the urine.  Add in a general increase in station clutter - ticket gates and cables and lights - and the Oostlijn was tired and run down.  One politician, Alderman Eric Wiebes, called it a "bitch that needs to be tamed", which is so brilliantly Dutch they should've immediately made him Prime Minister.

The architectural firm Group A was given the job of restoring the network and making it suitable for 21st century.  They stripped back the walls to reveal the concrete again; new treatments developed since the stations were built could be applied and meant they could resist graffiti without compromising their look.  Lifts were rebuilt in glass, open for everyone to see, so they no longer acted as urinals.  Windows were introduced as much as possible to create open spaces, while at the same time, leaving you with nowhere to hide, while lighting was introduced throughout to illuminate the dark spaces.  Each station was given an expanded ticket hall where the machines and services were integrated into the wall to stop vandalism.  And then there were those tiled signs, designed by René Knip, finally giving each station the identity it deserves.

I had no idea about all this at the time.  All I saw was an attractive metro network, clean, tidy, with Brutalist touches that thrilled me and those lovely tiled names.  I found it all out afterwards via a wonderful book called Metro Oostlijn Amsterdam which I highly recommend buying if you've got any interest in station architecture or urban design or if you just like looking at pretty pictures.

Outside Holendrecht, they built a bus exchange, where I had my one and only negative encounter with a member of the Netherlandish public.  An agitated man, who I am pretty sure was recently at the hospital next to the station, approached and barked a lot of Dutch at me.  I could only stammer a reply of, "I'm sorry, I'm English", which is, let's be honest, something we should probably say whenever we talk to foreigners.  The man was unimpressed and marched off to find someone more able to help.

Across from the hospital was an office park and I vanished into it, following bland avenues between tall buildings.  It seemed that this was undergoing some regeneration of its own, with older blocks being demolished and replaced by shiny new ones.  What looked exciting and futuristic in 1981 was dated and tired.  If they hung on long enough it might become retro and fashionable again.

One thing that made me laugh was that, for some reason I couldn't quite understand, these new gleaming office blocks had all been named after friends of your mum.  I spotted Dorothy, Rosalyn and Barbara; presumably Phase 2 will include Elaine, Val and Lynne.  I followed the road round, with the noise of the motorway getting louder and louder, and on the horizon was the entrance to the Gasperdammertunnel.  If you cast your mind back you'll remember that I'd actually walked over the top of that tunnel earlier in the day; I was ridiculously pleased to see it again from a different angle.  

Under the motorway was less fun.  The Dutch are the tallest people on the planet, with the average for men being six feet, and yet they build their underpasses with seemingly the bare minimum of clearance.  I'm only five foot nine but I could reach up and touch the underside of the motorway bridge.  The men of the country must be permanently cracking their head on things.  Incidentally, what's this obsession among gay men with six foot?  Everyone thinks they're scraping that height, and they go all gooey the more over the bar you go.  I don't get it.  Personally I love a Short King; I like to be able to look over the top of your head.  When I first met the BF I thought he was shorter than me, and I remember the disappointment when I stood up and realised he was an inch taller.  

On the other side of the road I found myself at the back of a blue and yellow Ikea, because some things are constant no matter where you are in the world.  Again, the signage was in both Dutch and English, and once again I must ask of the Netherlands: who hurt you?  Why do you hate your native tongue so much?

Tucked in amongst the boring office blocks and hotels was a small garden, De Proefzaak, which accompanied a tin shed that housed a brewery.  It looked scrappy and defiant amongst the ordinary cubes, and I thought back to the community restaurant near Verrin Stuartweg station that was closing for redevelopment.  I wondered how long it would survive here before another business hotel bought the land and turfed them out.

Bullewijk station was simple to get to, a straight path leading to the escalator hall (which Metro Oostlijn Amsterdam has informed me are called "sphinxes", because of the way they poke up over the tracks).  Unfortunately, that day the building site next door had spilled over onto the path in a way that I don't think was 100% local authority approved.  Heras fencing had been erected to completely seal off the route.  The result was a lot of confused passengers trying to work out how to reach the station; in the end we picked through the weeds and grass around the canal, dropping down below the road level, while the workers watched us.  They didn't seem to be actually doing anything, of course.

That sign on the bridge apparently translates as I Stand For You.  No, me either.  An encouragement for polite behaviour when you spot a pregnant lady on a busy train?

I can't look at those lift shafts the same way since I learned about the cat litter.

Battleground

Most cities would be thrilled to get a Metro.  Amsterdam is not most cities.

In the 1970s, the city council and the government were working together to drag the city into the present day, and the metro was part of that plan.  The Nazi Occupation had left parts of the centre hollowed out and ruined, even decades later; a new transport network would be the catalyst for the rebuild of these districts, with new office developments and commercial opportunities.  It would be marvellous for everyone.

The first thing that annoyed the residents was the way the subway was being built.  In most cities, you get a tunnel boring machine under the ground, and it works away while the world continues on top.  Alternatively, there's the cut and cover method, where the ground - often a roadway - is peeled back, you dig down, and then cover it back up when you're finished.

Amsterdam's wet, sandy foundations made neither of these methods easy.  The decision was made instead to construct the line using caissons; enormous, prebuilt concrete tunnel sections that would be sunk into the ground along the route.  They connect up to form a long concrete tunnel that can then be filled with the services needed.  This is, as you might expect, something of an undertaking.  It also needs a huge amount of land, because you need space alongside the route to build the concrete sections and have sufficient space to lower them in.  Hey, but that wasn't a problem, was it?  After all, it was all getting demolished anyway.  And when it was all laid, you'd have enough space left behind to build something really useful on top.  Like a big, four lane motorway.

As the line crept further and further north, the protests got louder and more forceful.  It was particularly contentious around the future Nieuwmarkt station.  The reason this area was so run-down and deserted was the Nazis had systematically eliminated the population of the former Jewish Quarter.  After they went, a terrible winter hit the city, and with the occupiers unwilling to help the Dutch they had to help themselves.  They ransacked the empty homes and buildings around the Nieuwmarkt, stripping them of anything they could use as firewood in the bitter cold.  The result was a district that was falling to pieces, right in the city centre, and which never really recovered after liberation.

In the Sixties, though, the hippies moved in.  Those empty buildings became squats for people who couldn't afford the city's expensive rents.  They made them, if not habitable, then at least occupied.  They formed a community and they made it work.  And now the city was going to bulldoze them out of the way for a new world of unbridled capitalist indulgence.  A place where people were finally able to live cheaply would be replaced by office blocks.  The squatters would be turfed out to who knows where.

The climax of the resistance came in 1975, when riots broke out around the construction - or, more accurately, demolition - sites.  Water cannons were called in, the protesters were subdued, but their point had been made, and now everyone could see it.  

The city council backed down.  The metro would still go ahead - it was too far gone to stop - but the highway on top was scrapped.  Also abandoned were plans for new commercial properties and a whole new look to the area.  Instead, the street lines were restored to what they had been before, the old historic plan.  The offices and shopping centres were scrapped and homes were built instead - social houses, at a reasonable rent, so that the district became a place for people again.  

Nieuwmarkt station commemorates all this with the artwork on its platforms.  There are pictures of what used to be here, the homes and shops and bars that were demolished for the metro.  Some parts look like smashed mirrors, or perhaps windows.  There are pictures of the protests.  And above it all, as you head down to the platform, there's a wrecking ball.  A reminder that this progress came at a price.

I love metros.  I love underground railways.  I get why the residents were furious.  It soured the city on underground railways for decades (and then, when they finally built another one but with more traditional tunnelling methods, that also went over budget and caused subsidence; really, Amsterdam had terrible luck with its infrastructure).  Part of me thinks that they should've sucked it up for the greater good of the city.  You can't fight progress.

Stepping out into the Nieuwmarkt itself, though, I got it.  This was a human place in a way that the areas between Waterlooplein and Weesperplein hadn't been.  Low buildings - still a few storeys, but not the envisaged tall concrete behemoths - built in a scattered form around a square.  Homes with balconies and the odd playground.  A civilised space to live.  And now they had a fast underground railway as well.  The best of all worlds.

I walked around the square.  I was now at the edge of the Red Light District, and the rest of my time in the city would be a descent into decadence and hedonism, the likes of which I had never seen before.  Sex, drugs, more sex; it was all to come.

Nah, of course it wasn't.  I got straight back on the train to go and collect some more stations.

Happy Places

 

Strolling.  I've never been good at it.  

I'm a fast walker, too fast probably.  My body sweats and complains the whole time but I persist.  I'm going somewhere, I'm walking somewhere, I get there fast.  There's no point hanging about.  Walking with other people becomes a frustration.  Why are you holding me back?  Why are you dawdling?

I walked along the side of the Amstel, along the Weesperzijde, and I still wasn't strolling.  I was still pounding my way along.  But this was a different walk.  I was so utterly happy.

Everything around me delighted.  The buildings, the people, the slow moving cars and polite cyclists.  The gentle breeze that rolled in across the river.  There were houseboats lined up on the shore, neat, preserved, one with a chicken coop with actual chickens pecking about.  I felt a lightness I'd not felt in a long time.

It's rare to get an opportunity to be utterly self-centred.  We live amongst structures of friends and family and people.  If you do exactly what you want to do, it will affect someone else.  Your partner won't be as happy as they could be.  Your boss will become frustrated.  You have obligations and duties and a whole set of other frameworks piled up inside your head.

I realised, walking in Amsterdam, just how deep those pressures were inside me.  I realised that I spent every day of my life buckling under obligations and options and "stuff I have to do".  No wonder I'm a little bit nuts.

Here though, it was just me.  Nobody around on the riverbank knew about my plans or what I was up to; they didn't care either.  I was entirely anonymous.  Anyone who cared about me or was aware of who I was was hundreds of miles away.  I had a schedule that was entirely my own, a plan I'd conceived and was executing without interference or discussion.  I was exploring a beautiful city at my own pace, visiting buildings I found interesting, being me without any other duress.  I wasn't strolling physically, but my brain was.  Finally, after too long, it was taking a break.

I realised my mind was gently drifting along.  Normally when I walk I have to have headphones on.  Something to drown out the noise of my brain, the darkness that hides there, the thoughts that swell up when I'm alone.  Here I was simply enjoying everything I saw.  That doorway.  That bar.  That woman.  It slipped into my mind and was appreciated, coveted, gently stroked before being filed away.  There wasn't any pain.  A little bit of me wanted to stay here, riding the metro, forever.

Eventually I turned away from the river and onto a green side street lined with houses that no doubt cost an astronomical amount entirely disproportionate to how tight and tiny they were. Balconies were laden with chairs and patio tables.  Parked cars hugged the kerb.  It was dense and yet silent.

It meant that arriving on the busy Wibautstraat came as a bit of a shock.  Suddenly there were tall buildings and a wide carriageway full of buses and trucks.  It wasn't a gentle avenue, as I'd become used to in Amsterdam: this was a through route, a busy highway, the Euston Road but with a Dutch twist.

I found Wibautstraat station outside the "Church" of Scientology.  I noticed that the signs outside for a Free Personality Test were all in English, not Dutch, and I decided this wasn't linguistic colonialism, but was instead the locals being too clever to fall for it and so they had to target gullible tourists instead.  

After the glorious sign at Spaklerweg, I was disappointed there wasn't something similar here.  Until I noticed the station name was actually inside the entrance - a nice stylistic choice, but not exactly great for people wanting to get about the city.  It meant that to get the name of the station and my fat head in the same shot, I had to go onto a piece of pavement between the edge of the entrance building and a busy cycle lane and squat.  I got quite a few curious looks.

Below ground again, the place where I was most content.  From here to the end of the 51/53/54, it was underground stations all the way.  Perhaps I'm secretly part mole.  Perhaps that's why I'm not so jolly wandering around the world as a human being.  A wide concourse under the street with its own snack bar lead down to the island platform.  

All the underground stations on the Oostlijn were built with artwork on the walls.  At Wibautsraat, it's large coloured letters, scattered along the trackside; they symbolise the newspapers and magazines that relocated to this area in the 60s.  

One quick train ride and I was at Weesperplein.  There's a run of W stations here - Wibautstraat, Weesperplein and Waterlooplein - which may be geographically accurate and a pleasing pattern, but caused no end of confusion in my brain.  I could never quite get my head around what order they came in.

There wasn't an island here, but instead two separate platforms opposite one another on the tracks.  The reason for this is that Weeserplein was designed as an interchange with an unbuilt East-West metro line, so passenger numbers were anticipated to be larger as people changed between lines.

The tunnels for the planned line were constructed , but never put into use for transit.  Instead they were repurposed as nuclear bomb shelters, and Weeserplein got a variety of "upgrades" that would enable it to be sealed off completely.  Personally I'd rather die.  I don't see the point in going down into a hole to live for months, just so I can re-emerge to some blasted wasteland.  If the four minute warning went off I'd go outside and welcome the blast with open arms - there was a report a few months ago that said Liverpool would be one of the first targets for a Russian attack, and I thought "good".  I've seen Threads.  I don't want to be scrabbling around in a feudal society while my teeth fall out.  Come friendly bombs, and fall on Scott.  

It means there's a huge circulation area above the platforms which was largely empty and unused.  Part of the recent refurbishment saw all the clutter being taken away to create open spaces in stations, which is admirable, but left Weeserplein feeling distinctly vacant.  Perhaps at rush hour it fills up.  The new East-West metro plans, which I first mentioned about eight hundred years ago, would finally create the interchange it's been begging for for nearly fifty years.

I picked an exit at random.  They all chucked you out onto the Weeserplein; it was simply a question of using Google Maps to reorient myself once I got up top.  I walked along the busy street, past an Asian tour group who politely lined up with their phones, one after another, to get exactly the same photo of a canal from a bridge.  I hope they all go home and have What I Did On My Holiday nights round each others' houses where they all have to look at 400 identical shots of Amsterdam.  Further along the street had been closed and filled with flower tubs.  I'm not sure if this was a permanent move, or simply part of some local festival, but it was remarkable how much of a change it made.  You don't realise how stress-inducing the relentless grind of traffic is, how it exists as a constant noise under your thoughts, until it vanishes.

At the top of the street, a series of angled shapes poked up from behind a low wall.  This was the Netherlands' National Holocaust Monument.  The area I was in had once been the Jewish sector of the city.  When the Nazis invaded, they first closed off the area, marking it out as a no-go area with signs, putting out roadblocks, raising bridges.  Jews from other parts of the Netherlands were forced to relocate to Amsterdam.  Then, of course, they began to send them away.  75% of Amsterdam's Jewish population were killed by the Nazis, about half of them in Auschwitz.  A once thriving section of the city was forcibly emptied and abandoned.  The names of the victims were memorialised in horrifying quantities.

Waterlooplein station is spread over a wide area of the city.  Its main entrance and exit is under the Stopera, the city's Town Hall/Opera House complex, but I was headed to a smaller entrance, tucked away under a bridge at the canal side.  Something about the way it was almost hidden appealed to me.  Again: mole person.

The tiled notice was visible through a glass window over the escalators.  Pedants will note that a strut of the window covers up the AT of Waterlooplein; I assure you they are very much present in the sign.  To be frank I'd rather you concentrated on that than my multiple chins.  

In an attempt to discourage anti-social behaviour, GVB has taken to playing music at their stations.  At Weeserplein it had been gentle classical music; at Waterlooplein it was Ebbs and Flows by Aaron Taylor.  I'm not sure what the thinking is behind this.  I sort of get that hyperactive teenagers don't really want to spend their time hanging around somewhere that's playing Debussy Preludes; it's not really a conducive atmosphere for a bit of light vandalism and rowdiness.  Ebbs and Flows, though, was quite a pleasing song; I'd loiter a bit longer to have a listen.  That makes me horribly middle aged, doesn't it?  Young people are listening to that and waiting for the bass to drop and I'm gently swaying along.  Although it didn't make me want to tear up the seats either, so job well done.

Waterlooplein's main feature is its tiled mural of the word WATERLOO in a delightfully 1970s font.  There was some suggestion of replacing all the original artworks on the line with new ones in the refurb, until there was a public backlash; we quickly become used to what was once brave and innovative and make it comfortable.  

99% of you now have Abba bouncing around inside your head.  

1% of you are thinking of Timothy Dalton at the end of The Living Daylights.  I love all my readers equally, but I love that 1% just a little bit more.  

Happiness is being in an underground station, thinking about James Bond and Eurovision.  It's as blissful as I ever get.