Huis te Bretten

The deeper story

For centuries, the Spaarndammerdijk ran westward from old Sloterdijk through a low and watery landscape. Peat polders lay to its south, while the open waters of the IJ began on the northern side. After the Haarlemmertrekvaart was dug in 1631 and 1632, narrow pieces of land remained between the new canal and the winding dyke. A house built on one of these leftover plots in or around 1635 later became known as Huis te Britten or Huis te Bretten.

The name probably referred to the Brittenburg near Katwijk. Remains believed to belong to this Roman fortification occasionally appeared at low tide during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ruins captured the imagination and became connected with ideas about the Batavians and the Roman past of Holland. The name Huis te Britten may later have changed to Huis te Bretten after an owner named Van Bretten acquired the property. The precise development of the name remains uncertain.

The building is sometimes described as a country house or estate, but it was not a grand aristocratic residence. Its location determined its main purpose. Tow barges travelled between Amsterdam and Haarlem, while passengers and goods also moved along the road and dyke. Huis te Bretten became an inn, tavern and eating house where travellers could rest, drink and eat.

The site lay outside the crowded city but not outside the flow of traffic. Horses pulled barges along the towpath. Coaches, carts and pedestrians used the land routes. The inn stood where several lines through the landscape met. From the house there were views across canal, polder and dyke, while traffic passed between Amsterdam, Sloterdijk, Halfweg and Haarlem.

The property does not appear to have been a particularly profitable estate. It changed owners regularly and survived mainly because of its practical function beside the route. Huis te Bretten was not an extensive country estate with a large park, but a recognisable stopping place on a narrow strip between canal and dyke. The small polder that later carried the same name did not yet exist. It was created only after the site was excavated for the construction of the railway.

Transport changed again at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Plans for a railway between Amsterdam and Haarlem became increasingly concrete. The new line followed roughly the same east-west direction as the canal because an established corridor already crossed the low landscape. Railways, however, required straight tracks, clear space and new earthworks.

Huis te Bretten stood in the way. The building was demolished and part of its site excavated in 1837. Two years later, in 1839, the Amsterdam–Haarlem railway opened. The first railway in the Netherlands took over the transport role long supported by the canal and the inn. A place where travellers had once moored or stopped to eat and drink disappeared for a form of transport that passed it at increasing speed.

Demolition and excavation created a low-lying area of more than three hectares that retained the name Huis te Britten on maps. The building had gone, but the new polder, its ditches and the surviving name continued to mark the location for more than a century. The railway ran alongside it and the surroundings initially remained largely agricultural.

That pattern also disappeared during the twentieth century. From the 1960s onward, large areas of the old polders were covered with sand for the development of Amsterdam’s western harbour. Farmhouses were demolished, ditches filled and sections of the medieval Spaarndammerdijk excavated. Roads, railway lines, sports grounds and harbour infrastructure replaced meadows and low peat soil.

Not everything was built over. A long strip between Sloterdijk and Halfweg remained largely open. Reed beds, rough vegetation, shrubs and spontaneous woodland developed on the disturbed and raised ground. This area became known as the Bretten zone and later as the Lange Bretten. The name of a single vanished house therefore became attached to a nature area created long after its demolition.

Several older landscape elements also survived or were made visible again. A section of the old Spaarndammerdijk remains near the Spieringhorn sports grounds. Farther west, waterways and recreated ditches recall the former peat-meadow landscape. These features did not belong directly to the house, but they show the type of landscape in which the inn once stood.

In 2014, the vanished site received a new landmark. Artist Pieter Boekschooten designed Deur naar het verleden, a freestanding doorway made of weathering steel. Its surface includes an image of Huis te Bretten. The doorway stands near the Seineweg and Spaarnwouderweg, in the area of the vanished inn.

The artwork does not reconstruct the building or pretend that the old surroundings still exist. Instead, it marks their absence. Looking through the opening reveals no historic room or garden, but sports fields, infrastructure and greenery. The front door remains without a house behind it. It therefore expresses precisely what happened here: the building disappeared, the later polder was erased and only the name survived.

The site becomes legible when its different transport lines are considered together. The old dyke refers to travel over land and protection from the IJ. The Haarlemmertrekvaart recalls barges and towpaths. The railway represents the technology for which Huis te Bretten was demolished. Roads and viaducts add the movement of the modern city.

At the steel doorway, therefore, look beyond the image of the vanished house. Turn around and follow the lines in the present landscape: dyke, railway, canal and roads. An inn once stood between them where travellers briefly stopped. The house has disappeared, but the surrounding area still carries its name.