De middeleeuwse huizen van de Nijmeegse benedenstad. Resultaten van een historisch documentatieproject (1959-1973)

The redevelopment of Nijmegen’s Lower Town, the oldest and most impoverished part of the city, had already been mooted before the Second World War. After the war the city council considered a succession of redevelopment plans, finally opting for a street plan that more or less echoed the original, historical parcellation. Although the historical value of the houses was acknowledged, a large number of houses were demolished in the 1960s. To document the buildings scheduled for demolition, officials from Department for the Preservation of Historic Buildings conducted a survey between 1959 and 1973. A report was drawn up for each building, including scaled drawings of the principal dimensions and details.
No digest of the survey of houses in Nijmegen’s Lower Town has ever been published. To fill this gap in the historiography of Dutch houses, this article provides an overview of the key results of the survey. After a brief introduction on the decline of the Lower Town and the series of urban design plans that led up to the dramatic demolition operation, the surveyed houses themselves are considered in terms of dating and house shapes, windows, cellars, joists, bracing and corbel pieces, timber stairs, roof constructions and other interior elements. Although the use of brick was clearly on the rise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – even the oldest topographical representations of Nijmegen depict a brick-built city – it should be borne in mind that this was a lengthy process and that timber construction persisted for a long time.
The article concludes with a brief analysis of the Nijmegen house landscape compared with the rest of the Netherlands. This shows that – contrary to assumptions in the literature – there is no evidence that the lower town contained dozens of stone houses as early as the thirteenth century. Stone cellars did exist, however, usually with timber ceilings but occasionally with tuff vaults. The cellar typology bears comparison with that in houses in cities like Arnhem, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Maastricht and Roermond. Despite the compelling parallels with ’s-Hertogenbosch in terms of the general shape and cellar development, the construction of the Nijmegen houses was different. The survey did not come across any timber frame houses. When it came to construction, Nijmegen houses had more in common with those in Arnhem, Venlo and Roermond.