(photograph © Kiwidutch)
This is another post from the photographs I took when the Haags Gemeentearchief (the Hague City Council Archive ) sent billboards around the city to celebrate their 125th anniversary a few years ago.
This particular photo is taken in an area on the outskirts of the city, by the beach on the north western edge looking out over the Oostduinen (between Belgisch Park and the dunes).
The area behind here is called Meijendel and it’s where The Hague gets most of it’s water from, it’s also a recreational area.
You can just see the water tower in the background in the billboard photo but the house that stands alone on the other side of the street obscures it in my photo because the billboard photo was taken from one of the upper windows in the houses behind where I took my photo.
(I look a photo of possible house windows, that would give roughly the right angle, but your guess is as good as mine when it comes to guessing which one it might be)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
Another place of note (or is that notoriety?) nearby to where this photo was taken is the United Nation’s tribunal’s detention center.
This houses criminals on trial or have been convicted in the U.N’s The Hague War Crimes Tribunal, Yugoslave Tribunal (Slobodan Milosevic, until his death and currently Karadzic & Mladic) or for the International Criminal Court (Charles Taylor Liberia ).
I can only send out an open invitation to many of the world most wanted (and unwanted men): Robert Maugabe, Muammar al-Qaddafi et el, I’m sure we have a name-plate ready for your room here too.
Otherwise this is a quiet suburb… yes I did wonder what the little house that stands alone was, and why no other buildings have appeared on the land on the right-hand side of it in all these years. I couldn’t find any specifically identifying information for the building anywhere so far but Himself hazarded a guess and wondered if it’s maybe accommodation for the caretaker of the reserve area behind.
Two dramatic changes have taken place in the “then” and “now” photos: first is the high rise apartment and shopping block on the other side of the road from the solitary house and secondly the train track that ran behind the house not only is long longer in use, but actually no longer exists!
I find that rather amazing, so many places around the world where a house stands for decades somewhere and a train line gets put through the area, I don’t think it’s too often that a house on a the edge of a city looses the train line next to it.
That’s what I call progress!
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
