How a street party became 950 Victorians
Transcript
Every December, for one weekend, nine hundred and fifty people in Deventer put on top hats and bonnets and stop being Dutch. Scrooge walks the Bergkwartier. Oliver Twist begs on the Walstraat. Carol singers block the alleys. And more than sixty thousand visitors shuffle through in a queue that the organisers now manage with time slots, because it used to stretch for hours.
It started with a shopkeeper's wife. In 1991 Emmy Strik had an idea for the Walstraat, the street where she and her husband Jan had their shop: dress the street up as Victorian London for a weekend, in the spirit of Charles Dickens. She took it to the city. The city was not interested. So she and Jan did it themselves, on their own street, with their neighbours.
That was the first edition. This is the thirty-fourth. The festival has long since spilled out of the Walstraat into the whole Bergkwartier, the oldest quarter of Deventer, with its crooked medieval houses that need no set dressing at all. The characters are volunteers, many of them regulars who have played the same role for decades, and there is a waiting list to join.
Why does it work here? Because Deventer is already a nineteenth-century city at heart: a Hanseatic trading town that got rich, got quiet, and kept its buildings. Add gas lamps, chestnuts and a brass band, and the illusion costs almost nothing.
One thing to look for: the Charles Dickens Cabinet on the Walstraat, the street where it all began. And if you want to skip the queue, come early, on Saturday, and enter through the Keizerstraat, the only way in.
Source: dickensfestijn.nl
