Dutch neo-Renaissance
Red brick with pale stone bands — the national style of its moment.
Kattenkruid at Dutch Wikipedia — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Thirzakerina — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ton Schollen — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mark Ahsmann — CC BY-SA 3.0
A water tower of 1895 in northern central Utrecht, and among the oldest surviving water towers in the city. The building is red brick cut horizontally by pale stone bands, with small arched windows and a broad top carrying the iron tank. This manner — Dutch neo-Renaissance — was the usual choice for public works in the late nineteenth century because it was regarded as Dutch in identity, at a time when the country was searching for a national style. The tower was built because Utrecht brought running water to its houses in those years, a change more sanitary than technical: before it, residents depended on wells and polluted canals, and cholera struck Dutch cities periodically. Europe's water networks were built primarily to stop epidemics rather than for comfort. It went out of service and was later converted to another use. It is not entered and is seen from the street.
Red brick with pale stone bands — the national style of its moment.
Running water was built to stop cholera, not for comfort.
The late nineteenth-century Netherlands was seeking an architectural identity.
Lauwerhof, north of central Utrecht
Because the bacterium spreads through water contaminated with sewage. In nineteenth-century cities canals served for both drainage and drinking, making epidemics inevitable. The physician John Snow proved the link in London in 1854 by tracing a single water pump, a founding moment in epidemiology. Afterwards European cities built clean water networks and separate sewers, and this is the context of towers like this one.
North of the centre is quieter than the tourist core: residential canals, nineteenth-century houses and a number of small parks. The city gardens are nearby, and the Dutch railway museum is about twenty minutes' walk east — among Europe's best railway museums, housed in a genuine old station.
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