November 15, 2021
Heemschut – the largest heritage association in the Netherlands – nominates the village of Doel as the most endangered heritage in Europe
Last weekend, the Dutch Heritage Association Bond Heemschut nominated the Flemish village of Doel as the most endangered heritage in the ‘7 Most Endangered Programme’ of Europa Nostra. That a Dutch member of Europa Nostra nominates a place in Flanders is striking. For Flanders, this is nothing less than a reproach.
The 7 Most Endangered program was launched in January 2013 by Europa Nostra with the European Investment Bank Institute as a founding partner and the Development Bank of the Council of Europe as an associated partner. It identifies endangered monuments and sites in Europe and mobilizes public and private partners to find a viable future for those sites. The Bond Heemschut was founded in 1911 and is, with its more than 5000 members, committed to the protection of valuable objects and areas.
‘t Eylandt den Doel
The nomination applies to the so-called ‘t Eylandt den Doel and includes both the village and the surrounding polders. It is an age-old heritage landscape that has been threatened from the 1970s by the ever-expanding port.
According to Heemschut, the seventeenth-century landscape pattern of village and polder is one of the first manifestations of the grid pattern, a design from the Low Countries that even reached New York. The Beemster in North Holland has been declared a World Heritage Site for this, among other things. Nowhere is the development of the landscape of the Low Countries more visible than in Doel. The almost untouched primordial landscape of the Verdronken Land van Saeftinghe is located next to a polder landscape with medieval, seventeenth-century, eighteenth-century and modern elements, which in turn is located next to a high-tech, twenty-first-century landscape of the port. In the village is one of the only stone mills on a river embankment in northwest Europe. The dike sequence of Doel is unique: nowhere in the world are dikes from so many centuries so close together, from the sixteenth-century Zoetenberm to the twenty-first-century Sigmadijk. Historical farms, barns and farm workers’ cottages and a seventeenth-century ‘house of plaisance’ show the development of wealth in the seventeenth century.
The Flemish government systematically did everything in its power to acquire the land and buildings of the village and polder for the benefit of the expansion plans of the port of Antwerp. A strategy of active depopulation followed. The vacancy made the buildings – about a hundred of them with heritage value – receptive to decay, pillage and eventually demolition.
Legally rescued, but seriously endangered
After years of legal battle between residents, farmers and the Doel 2020 action committee, the village is once again an official residential area ‘with historical, cultural and aesthetic value’. That has been the case since 2017. In 2018, the Flemish Government announced that Doel will no longer be affected. But three years later, the Flemish government, which owns most of the historic buildings, still does not allow habitation. Nothing is being done to protect the valuable heritage either. As a result, the buildings continue to deteriorate. In the meantime, people also want to realize so-called nature compensations in the polder, whereby large parts of the special seventeenth-century polder landscape are in danger of disappearing due to excavations and redevelopment of the landscape.
Doel is still a unique place, a place with a rich history, with plenty of potential for the local community, the port and the many interested parties from home and abroad who visit it every day. Since its existence in 2006, the Heritage Community of Doel and Polder has been advocating that Doel and the surrounding polders receive the appreciation it deserves. The fact that the EGD&P now receives the support of the largest heritage association in the Netherlands says a lot. Doel 2020 argues that the Flemish Government should finally recognize the legal situation in the village (residential area with historical, cultural and aesthetic value) and changes its policy premanently.
