Our Lord in the Attic: Amsterdam's secret church

Little is left hidden in the red light district of Amsterdam.

Here, generally, display is rather more to the point

But, pick your way past the brightly-lit shop windows with their array of human goods and you find something truly hidden – a secret Catholic church created in the loft of a 17^th century, canal-side merchant’s house on Oudezijds Voorburgwal.

Our Lord in the Attic, Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, has been a church since 1661 – it celebrated its 350^th anniversary in May – and a museum since 1888.

It was the main place of worship forAmsterdam’s Catholics during two centuries of repression – following the so-called Alteration, which transferred power in the city to Protestants in 1578, and under which Catholics could worship, but not in places that were recognisably churches from the outside.

Visitor numbers increased dramatically in the early years of this century until, in the year 2005, 90,000 climbed the winding wooden staircases through the remarkably-intact former-home of merchant Jan Hartman to reach the galleried church above: so many that they became a serious problem.

The church was being profoundly damaged by the tramp of feet, the wet raincoats and hot breath of all those pilgrims.

Something had to be done. But what?

Could the damage and decline be reversed?

Would visitor numbers have to be cut?

And, if restoration were to be conducted –exactly what form should it take?

Our Lord in the Attic had been the surreptitious Catholic parish church forAmsterdam’s city centre for over two centuries, until St Nicolas’s church opposite Central Station was dedicated in 1887.

If the years were to be peeled painstaking back, which date should the restoration focus on?

Questions, questions.

A key member of the team that has had to find the answers is Thijs Boers, one of three curators at the museum, and responsible for the conservation effort.

Thijs says: “We had our gut feeling about the damage the visitors were causing, to the fabric, and to the climate in the building, but that was not enough. We needed to know for sure, we needed to get in the expertise to test this, so we could be certain what the threats to the building were – and how to deal with them.”

The museum turned to experts and organisations including the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, and the Getty Conservation Institute. A commission of experts was established.

Over two years these august bodies assessed the indoor climate, the condition of the collection of art and artefacts, of the building, of the impact of visitors, and also looked at the visitors’ experience.

There was good news early on: the house and church could cope with the numbers that wanted to visit it, if things were managed effectively. Key to that was to purchase the house next door, across the Heintje Hoekssteeg alley, which will become a visitors’ reception area, from which they could be delivered to the house through an underground passage, leaving the worst of the outdoors behind them.

But some of the other fundamentals were not nearly so straightforward. They involved what you might call a holistic approach to the restoration or, as Thijs puts it: “We needed to listen to the history of the house.”

If this were to be a conservation effort that successfully uncovered and sustained the house and the precious church with its commanding18^th century altarpiece showing the Baptism of Christ, it had to be done with empathy, and a great deal of research.

Thijs and his colleagues came up with guiding principles that have shaped the Euro10.5m restoration.

One was a radical departure from previous practice.

The house had been treated as a museum; a receptacle for artefacts but,

Thijs says: “We wanted to treat it as an historic house, and a home, with a church inside it.

“For instance, a painting in a particular room might be hung as it would in a museum, for maximum visibility but, from an historic perspective, a painting of that kind might never be placed there. Indeed, it might never have been in that room in a 17^th century house inAmsterdam.”

And then there were the stories of the dwellers in the house – or rather houses. Merchant Hartman also owned the two tucked behind it. The church, which holds a congregation of 150, runs the full length of their linked attics.

Thijs says: “We discovered we had three stories we wanted to tell: of the owner Jan Hartman; of the original priest, an Augustinian called Petrus Parmentie; and of the church itself.”

Hartman was an interesting example of social mobility. “He came toAmsterdam, as an apprentice to a baker, from his home of Coesfeld inGermany.

“Later he went into business selling hosiery. He was obviously a pretty good businessman – it was hard to move up – and he later became a trader in linen. You needed connections – family in the widest sense – in order to make your way in the city in those days, and he clearly had those.”

Hartman made a lot of his money from the practice of the city authorities of leasing tax collection rights to private collectors.

His faith was no doubt his main inspiration for building his church but, Thijs points out, it also made business sense.

Because Harman made most of his money from tax collection, his attics – which most merchants crammed with stock – were relatively unused. And he charged the priest rent on the church, and for his accommodation.

The other key consideration that shaped the restoration effort was this:  How do you choose where to go back to?

Thijs answers: “You go back to an ethical point but no further. By that I mean you go to the last period when the building was used for its original purpose – in our case as a church, before it became a museum in 1868.

“To go back much further, we’d have had to demolish the Baroque altar which was installed in the last big changes in the 18^th century, and remove the organ, installed in 1749. That wouldn’t be ethical.

“With all of these considerations combined, we narrowed the period of the restoration to between 1800 and 1868.”

Infact they were able to be much more precise; rooting their restoration in a specific year: “We had an inventory for 1862, and accounts from 1850 to 1870s, so the year 1862 as the focus for our restoration looked good.

“And one past priest had interviewed two old ladies who lived in one of the houses behind the church, and could tell him how things were done in the 19^th century.”

The work of restoring Our Lord In the Attic to the church it was in 1862 is 90 per cent complete. When it’s done, the monthly Mass will be reinstated. The two houses behind the main dwelling will be finished next year.

Then it just remains for the subterranean passageway to be dug from the new visitors’ centre to the house – which will be completed in 2013, assuming they don’t strike anything historically significant that halts their tunnelling. Thijs doesn’t joke about such things: “InAmsterdam, that can happen.”

Pilgrim with a price on his head

We were on a pilgrim hunt. "You can't miss them," I told the children. "They have wide-brimmed hats, a knee-length cloak and a staff from which they hang a cup made from a hollowed-out pumpkin. Five keys hand from their belts, symbolising the five Roman basilicas for which they were headed."

What will you give us," they asked, with a predictable lack of spirituality, "for each one we find?"

How do you put a price on the head of a pilgrim? The countless men and women who, throughout the Middle Ages, tackled the Via Francigena, the rough and dangerous road that took them from Canterbury right across France and northern Italy to the Holy City, had risked their lives to make this journey, For them, this was virtually the highway to Heaven. What was that worth in monetary terms? I thought hard.

"How about 1,000 lira each?" I asked, trusting that the children would not convert the sum into sterling and scorn my offer of 30p.

The deal was done. Now that pilgrims had a price on their heads, our journey had acquired fascination even for a seven-year-old and a 10-year old.

It was actually something of a miracle that we could follow the pilgrims' footsteps across a swath of northern Italy. Unlike the Pilgrims' Way through Kent, which had remained well marked and well used down the centuries, the Via Francigena disappeared a coupe of hundred years ago.

It has been rediscovered, thanks to a 10th-century Archbishop of Canterbury called Sigeric. He had to make the journey to Rome in the year 990, to receive from the Pope the symbolic pallium, the woollen stole work by archbishops. He recorded the 79 stopping places on his journey. That record, preserved in the British Museum, has made it possible for modern-day pilgrims to retrace his route.

our pilgrim hunt bean in the ancient town of Fidenza, at which point the Via Francigena swings south, skirting Parma, and races for Tuscany. Fidenza was a place of pilgrimage in itself, because of the fate of San Donnino, a martyr who, having converted to Christianity, fled the court of the Emperor Maxmimian, but was caught and decapitated in AD 291 on the banks of the city's River Stirone. Donnino managed to pick up his severed head and carry it to the opposite bank.

One of the miracles which which he was credited occurred when the bridge named after him, the Ponte di San Donnino, collapsed under the weight of a crush of pilgrims and yet none was injured. The event is faithfully recorded on the facade. So many pilgrims were shown falling into the water and then emerging on the bank that I had to negotiate a group rate of 5,000 lira with the children. Already I could see that pilgrimage can be an expensive business.

Entering the cathedral between the figures of two snarling lions - their fierceness tempered by the fact that they look more like tortoises in cardigans than kins of the jungle - we found the bones of San Donnino himself. They lie, with the severed skull placed on his chest, in an open-sided, 3rd century Roman sarcophagus in the crypt. The children crouched on the floor and peered in.

The Via Francigena passes alongside the cathedral and on through the heart of Fidenza. From there, it zig-zags south across the flat country to Fornovo, a market town beside the River Taro.

The landscape changes swiftly. The flat plains give way to mountains within an hour. Fornovo, where the road swings across the River Taro on a long low bridge, is the halfway point. In the riverbed, stumps of dark rock like standing stones show the line of the Roman bridge that the pilgrims used.

On the facade of the parish church of Santa Maria Asunta is another statue of a pilgrim. He has kept his basket, his keys and his staff, but has lost his head. I tried to negotiate a discount with the children, but without success.

At modern-day pilgrim might stop at the Touring Pub round the corner on the Via Vittoria Veneto, a concrete affair like a 1950s bus station, which offers Kilkenny Bitter.
From Fornovo, the land climbs up the valley of the River Sporzana until, at Bardone - little more than a group of houses gathered around a hilltop crossroads - it brings you to the church of Santa Maria. It was locked when we arrived, but a woman suddenly appeared with the key.

Inside, we came upon the statue of San Rocco. Passing through this area as a pilgrim and finding that many of the inhabitants had the plague, he nursed them devotedly, until succumbing to the disease himself. His statue was crowned with a halo, there was a fresh wound on his left thigh and he was accompanied by a little dog that carried a hunk of brad in its mouth. The wound symbolised his disease and the dog represented a faithful pent that brought him food daily once he had withdraw to the woods to die.

We lit a candle to him, hence qualifying for his protection against plague, leprosy and all manner of nasty skin diseases.

From here, the direct route is now a main road which, although it is not busy, is less congenial than the narrow that lane that clings to the side of the adjacent valley of the River Baganza. The scenery is dramatic now, with snowcapped mountains above, the roaring river below and, alongside us, the jagged, zig-zagging, exposed strata of the rock.

In Berceto, which was the final significant stopping place before the pilgrims crossed the Apennines,m the repaved Via Francigena passes right through the medieval town and past the door of the cathedral.

This was the most dramatic of all the churches we encountered. Inside, it was dark and unadorned, the stout grey pillars fading into the gloom. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I made out a startlingly lifelike - or rather deathlike - sight. In a halo of light and flowers lay a painted statue fo the dead Christ, dressed in a cream shroud open at the chest. This was a profoundly sombre and atmospheric place.

Our journey was close to its climax as we made the final climb up to the Cisa Pass which, at 3,400ft, is the gateway through the Apennines to Tuscany and the road south to Rome.

Modern travellers have the option of taking the autostrada which, with all of the audacity with which Italians build their motorways, crosses high above the valley floor in double-decker formation, one carriageway beneath the other, then burrows beneath the pass to emerge at a modest elevation on the other side.

That was not for us. We wound our way up through the chestnut woods to the silent village of Corchia, the last point of habitation before the pass. This is an authentic enough medieval village to satisfy the most exacting of historic drama producers. The main street is too narrow for the tiny Fiats that can get everywhere else in Italy. Corchia even spurns the traditional decoration on its houses - ochre or mustard-painted rendering and dark green shutters - in favour of plain grey stone and slate.

Corchia, which until 1943 was an iron and copper mining village, feels as though it clings to the very edge of the world. Which is how it must have struck the pilgrims, all those centuries ago, when, with staff, keys and a few worldly possessions on their backs, they passed through here, stood at the narrow eminence of the Cisa Pass and looked down on the warm Tuscan hills flowing invitingly south.

Today, of course, we could have climbed into the car and been in Rome before the pilgrims were on level ground again. But we turned back. The road beyond would be a whole new journey. Besides, with the price of pilgrims being what it is, I could not afford to go any further.

Waterloo Sunset

Ok, here's a pop-quiz question. As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, what am I in?

Yes, I am in paradise.

And what does the dirty old river do?

Quite, it keeps flowing into the night.

I'm in Waterloo now, sitting on the first floor balcony of the Reef Bar, with its commanding view down the sweeping concourse of Waterloo Station.

So, if I were to tell you I was looking down at the millions of people, what would they be doing?

That's right, they'd be swarming like flies 'round Waterloo Underground.

Waterloo Sunset is one of those songs that millions of us know the words to. Ray Davies, its author and leader of The Kinks, is the poet laureate of London, and in this and a clutch of other delightfully evocative, catchy and unforgettable songs about the capital he has succeeded in chronicling its glamour, its seediness, its pleasures, its follies, and its homely suburbs better than anyone before or since.

He wrote Dedicated Follower of Fashion, which is about Carnaby Street, Regent Street and Leicester Square, Lola about Soho, and Muswell Hillbillies about his home turf up on the hill beyond Highgate. His song Victoria is, strictly, about the queen rather than the area, but you can stretch a point and add that in too.

Infact, so good is he at conjuring up the spirit of the capital city that you can take a Kinks Tour of London, starting at Waterloo, delving into the West End, heading north through Archway and ending up in Muswell Hill, singing his lyrics all the way.

And yet, remarkably, it's only by chance that Waterloo Sunset is so called. Originally the song was Liverpool Sunset, and hence the dirty old river would have been the Liver. But before it was recorded The Beatles came out with their Liverpool-inspired double-A side, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, and Ray decided that, rather than seeming to follow in their wake, he would transfer the location of his song to his home city.

And I for one am very glad that he did

From my Waterloo vantage point I can do what is most interesting about railway stations - watch people. Pensioners getting lost, policemen in twos, pigeons in flocks and at any one time at least a dozen fond farewells and heartfelt hellos. In Waterloo Sunset, Terry meets Julie every Friday night. Perhaps beneath the four faces of the station clock suspended, high above, from the glass roof.

These days, Waterloo is not so much a station, more a shopping mall. I could do any number of things here, eat any variety of food or drink, buy a shirt and tie, send an e-mail or text from a public phone, check out a Dali exhibition. There's even an impotence clinic.

Today, of course, the trains don’t just go to the suburban destinations carved into the stone of the war memorial arch - Surrey, Sussex, the Isle of Wight - but Paris, Brussels and Lille.

Waterloo Sunset conjures up the former incarnation, when for children like me the most exciting thing on the concourse was a cumbersome machine which, for 1d, and after much manoeuvering of a brass dial and tugging on a heavy iron lever, stamped out a narrow aluminium strip with your name on it.

When Terry and Julie left the station they crossed the river where, we are told, they feel safe and sound.

Ray Davies feels safe and sound in a little pub just across Waterloo Bridge in Savoy Street. I walk there, against a north wind, overtaking foreign students bent double beneath their backpacks like mountaineers. Ahead of me is the Shell-Mex building like an old fashioned petrol pump in white Portland stone, its prominent clock measuring hours rather than gallons.

The pub is the Savoy Tup. It's a rare find - an unimproved, unthemed, unspoilt pub in the heart of London. Its bar is plain, with a bare-board floor, cream-painted panel walls - the sort of place where Ray feels comfortable.

He mentions it in his book Waterloo Sunset, which is a curious blend of autobiography, fiction and myth-making.

A girl is asked "Who are you waiting for." And replies: "The man who wrote Waterloo Sunset. I've been in the bar at the Savoy every night, just as he said, but he never comes. He's not ready to leave the underground."

It sounds like whimsy, but its also a hint at the less than sunny side of Ray Davies. He is reputed, in 1973 when his marriage was breaking down, to have spent Christmas Day on the Circle Line, drinking cans of Kronenbourg.

From the Savoy Tup I walk along the Strand to Charing Cross. I take the northern line up towards Muswell Hill, stopping on the way at Archway, where the Archway Tavern had the distinction of appearing on the cover and inside the gatefold sleeve of the Muswell Hillbillies album. They weren't dumb enough to stand in their real local, I'll come to that later.

The pub is no longer the dark-wood and etched mirror place it was then, but somehow even more pertinent as a place to gaze into your beer and think, as Ray sang in Muswell Hillbillies, of coming from a nowhere kind of place and dream of a far romantic place you have never been - not Muswell Hill but New Orleans, (?)Oklahoma, Tennessee.

Then it's on to East Finchley station. From here, tree-lined Fortis Green takes me to Muswell Hill. If there is one street that can claim ownership of Ray Davies, this is it.

He was born here 56 years ago and grew up in a cramped house with his mum, dad and seven brothers and sisters. The pub where he first performed is in this road, and so is the grander house he bought when he became famous.

I find the Davies family home, 6 Denmark Terrace, just opposite the Clissold Arms. It's a Victorian brick semi with tiny bay windows attached to a joinery workshop. It was a musical home, with a piano in the parlour, to which Ray's parents Annie and Frederick would weave back from the Clissold Arms with a gang in tow for a singsong.

And it was here that, in 1964, Ray and his brother and fellow Kink Dave worked out the chords to You Really Got Me, the song that first put them at the top of the charts in August 1964.

The Clissold Arms is a real Kinks find. The large back bar has a display of Kinks memorabilia. Among them is a signed copy of the Kinks first single, Long Tall Sally, a guitar, a wall of photographs and a small brass plaque which reads:

Site of 1957 performing debut of

Ray and Dave Davies

Founding members of the Kinks.

Ray hasn't written about this street and the pub, but Dave has. His song Fortis Green goes:

"Mum would shout and scream when dad would come home drunk,
When she'd ask him where he'd been, he said 'Up the Clissold Arms',
Chattin' up some hussy, but he didn't mean no harm."

On my way up Fortis Green I had passed the home Ray bought when he got married. No. 87 is a large white-painted detached Victorian villa set back from the road with a gravel drive. He lived here in the late Sixties and early Seventies with Rasa, who he met when she was still a Bradford schoolgirl and mad-keen Kinks fan and saw them perform whenever she could, and his two daughters. It's Rasa's falsetto that you hear on the backing vocals of classic such as Sunny Afternoon.

Their schools were here, too. Fortismere School in Creighton Avenue, which was called William Grimshaw School when the brother attended and, on the other side of Fortis Green, St James Church of England Primary School. It's now in Woodside Avenue but when they attended was on Fortis Green opposite Fortismere Avenue.

I head off east into Muswell Hill, down Fortis Green Road with its deli, café, record store and bookshop, where Robbie Williams dominates the window display.

Where Sainsbury's now stands was once the Athenaeum, a dance hall that featured in the song Come Dancing. Athenaeum Place is still there alongside it, like a Ray Davies vignette - with a beggar on the corner, and rutted cobbles leading to a former orange brick Victorian church that is now an O'Neill's Irish bar.

I walk down Priory Road where the ground falls away and London is at your feet, first the trees and terraces of the lesser houses in the valley, then the City's tower blocks and Wren churches, finally Canary Wharf, grey and blinking in the winter sunlight

I find myself in another Kinks vignette as I reach the beer-sticky Northern Railway Tavern, step over a yawning dog in a tartan coat and pass a Baptist church with the sign reading "Heaven Knows when You were last Here".

I'm headed for the last outpost on my Kinks tour: their recording studios, Konk, on Tottenham Lane in Hornsey. A blue neon sign spells out the name above the door. It’s a windowless, beige-painted pebbledash place. Very anonymous, very North London rock star.

Why, such scenes are so evocative you could write a song about them. Or at least, you could if you were Ray Davies, the poet laureate of London.

Lakes and monsters

Holidaying with children goes through four phases. The first is when they are too young to voice an opinion on where you go or what you do. This is bliss, though not as much bliss as not having the little bundles of joy along in the first place.

The second is when you surrender your choices for theirs - the years of buckets and spades, theme parks, theme restaurants, Disney and Centreparcs. A chance for the adults to have a horrible time, and generally get in their revenge early for phase three.

For phase three is when the children will complain loudly that they are having the horrible-est time. Ever. In the whole history of horrible.

These are the years when you try to assert yourself and your adult tastes, in the inevitably futile hope of interesting them in things that you like, so you might begin to edge tentatively towards that great unreachable goal - the family holiday in which there is something to please everyone.

The fourth is that merciful stage when they refuse to come on your sad holidays in any case.

We are at phase three. Indeed, we seem to have been stuck at phase three for some time. Possibly for ever.

We decided to introduce our 12 and nine-year-olds to the Lake District, of which we had fond memories from a time BC - Before Children.

We would go cycling, we told them, on peaceful lanes and remote bridle paths, we would scramble up the fells for the exhilaration of hours spent walking on top of the world, from lake to shining lake.

And they replied: No we won't.

The north western corner of the Lake District has always been our favourite spot. You are off the main tourist drag that grinds from Windermere to Keswick. You have, in Loweswater, Crummock Water and Buttermere, three of the most peaceful lakes. And in Cockermouth, which sits at the head of the Vale of Lorton and just outside the boundary of the National Park, a real Cumbrian market town where farming is still more important that tourism.

We decided to break the children in gently. For our first cycle ride I took the two of them on an easy seven mile glide down from Cockermouth to Loweswater.

Swooping down the valley, with the green hills rising to enclose us as we approached the lake, it was not a bad introduction. But the ride was not without interruption. There were halts for water. For the removal of sweatshirts. For the replacement of sweatshirts. For the removal of helmets to facilitate the scratching of heads. For the adjusting of helmets which had not been replaced correctly by father but had instead been jammed back on, trapping ears.

Then came a standoff, when an alleged asthma attack had the 12-year-old wheezing most effectively at the top of a gentle incline. But it wasn't asthma. It was just breathlessness. Something today's sedentary child is entirely unfamiliar with.

But it was the incident of The Spider On The Handlebars that made me abandon the softly-softly approach.

Squealing in terror, the arachnophobe nine-year old released his hold on his bike, veered into the hedge and went flying off, narrowly missing a Larry Grayson lookalike who was busy dusting his gate.

Lookalike-Larry was entirely in sympathy with the children's perception of this as a crisis, and for his benefit I was solicitous. But I decided that from now on it would be No More Mr Nice Dad.

Next day we tried a hike, from Buttermere, around Crummock Water and striding up the fell-side to the spectacular 170 ft waterfall of Scale Force. It was a tough walk over rough and boggy ground, chosen to really give them something to moan about.

Perversely, they loved it.

They enjoyed it most when the path petered out, the ground became boggy, and there was much teetering on rocks and stumbling through marsh, with several bootfulls each of black, brackish water.

Each hardship brought squeals of delight - the greatest coming when I fell over.

Scale Force was a fitting destination. Clambering up the bed of the stream they cooled their hot heads beneath the plummeting torrent of white water, and watched a kamikaze sheep high above them, as it reached ever further over the abyss for the succulent leaves of a scrub oak.

On the way back the children announced that walks were OK as long as they were over bogs, and if I fell in at least once.

In that case, I announced, tomorrow we would try mountain climbing.

OK, at 2,159ft Whiteless Pike is not exactly Everest. But it looked like it to the children, as we set off from the shores of Crummock Water and they had to tilt their heads way back to look up to its pyramid peak.

When we hit the relentlessly-rising ridge there were complaints. But it was no good asking for food or water, because we had purposely left every form of sustenance in the car. There might be treats, but later, and they would have to be earned.

The children found the climb tough, as anyone but the superfit would. But each time they stopped and turned to look back, they found the view got better and better, and the sense of achievement grew. They most enjoyed the bits of steep exposed rock which had to be tackled with hands as well as feet.

There was one protest, however, when the puffing 12-year-old asked:

"What's the number of that emergency hot line?"

Assuming she was harking back to the threats she used to issue, when she felt we were being particularly harsh, to report us to Esther Rantzen I said:

"What, Childline?"

"No," she said, "NHS Direct."

Presumably the complaint would have been "My parents are making me climb a mountain and I think the effort will kill me."

But, fortuitously, mobile phones do not work in this corner of the Lake District, so she was denied any hope of outside assistance.

Things went swimmingly once the children treated the climb as a game, adapting one of their favourite ways of making a journey pass - laughing at people in other cars - to laughing at other walkers. There was plenty of scope. With their nobbly white knees, billowing shorts, beany hats and prawn-pink complexions, fell walkers are not exactly sex on legs.

And as they climbed towards the summit, they began to savour their achievement, delighted to find they could look way across to the Irish Sea to the west and to Keswick and Derwent Water to the east.

Indeed, looking down on the lane that winds up from Buttermere and through the pass at Newlauds Haus before dipping down to Derwent Water, they were indignant to see that it was possible to park there, at an altitude of over 1,000ft, and gain the fell tops with far less exertion than it had taken us to get there.

When we reached the top, I was convinced we had a pair of Lake District converts. They seemed to relish, as we squatted on this natural roof terrace, the deep satisfaction of having conquered a summit. And the descent - performed on their backsides, skimming over the soft springy grass - seemed to bring them unalloyed joy.

So much so that, in a sudden surfeit of optimism I said: "Maybe in 25 years you'll bring your children here."

They gave my pitying looks as they slid past.

"Nah" they said in unison.