# Keep moving, please

*Essay by Diede Tap, 2026. Canonical version: https://diedetap.com/en/essays/keep-moving-please/*

For Herkenrode Abbey I worked on the key route and co-wrote the script for the introduction film, which meant reading my way into the history of the place.

It turned out to be far more than a church. This was the first and largest women's abbey in the Low Countries, and the women running it were entrepreneurs: an enormous complex with economic weight, and sights that drew pilgrims. Those last two matter. Pilgrims had to sleep and eat, they left donations, and they drove the local economy. So the sisters kept building on whatever brought them in.

They collected relics for prestige, among them the forty-seven skulls of Ursula and her virgins, followed by a bleeding host in 1317 and papal recognition. An indulgence letter arrived in 1363, the stained glass in the 1530s. Whenever a reason was needed to revive the draw, one turned up.

The public didn't wander the grounds freely. There were fixed areas pilgrims were allowed into, ending at a small window through which they could see the host in its monstrance. Writing the script, I realised I wasn't describing a church. There was something to see, an audience came for it, and somebody had thought about how that audience moved.

## The circuit

That strikes me as surprisingly modern. The sisters weren't the only ones in European history with the problem, though. In Aachen, from 1322, the crowd grew large enough that the relic went up in the air and was displayed from the gallery, so the square below could see it. Buildings went up for the purpose, including the Gothic choir hall consecrated in 1414. In Maastricht the showing was an event with a protocol: once a day on the Vrijthof, after an open-air mass.

In the fifteenth century the journeys to Aachen, Maastricht and Kornelimünster drew over a hundred thousand pilgrims, and they wanted something to take home. Lead-tin badges, mass-produced, souvenir and devotional object in one.

The place doesn't have to be genuinely holy. At Varallo the whole point was that it wasn't: Jerusalem was too far, too expensive and too dangerous for the average pilgrim, so in 1486 the Franciscan Bernardino Caimi started building a copy in Piedmont. Walk up the mountain today and you pass forty-five chapels in a fixed order, each holding a life-size scene.

After the Council of Trent, bars and screens went in to stop visitors treating the figures too casually. They also fixed the viewing angle, and kept people moving.

What Caimi built wasn't a replacement but a stand-in, a way of making some version of the pilgrimage possible. The chapels sit at distances and angles that echo the real ones: a Holy Sepulchre, a Via Dolorosa, a Gethsemane. Nobody pretended you were in the real place, which is why it wasn't a problem. I see something of the Venice in Las Vegas here, or Epcot in Orlando. Not authentic either, but borrowing the sense of space and scale from the original.

## The ticket booth

Faith isn't always required. Around 1602 an Amsterdam innkeeper lays out a maze and charges for entry. You walk between the hedges past mechanical figures of David and Goliath. If the accounts are right there was also a life-size bagpiper whose head, eyes and hands moved, and hidden jets that soaked you if you stood in the wrong spot. All of it to draw people to the place, and to the inn beside it.

He didn't invent paid viewing. The menagerie at the Tower of London let you in for three halfpence, or for a dog or cat as lion food, and the Leiden anatomical theatre held paying dissections from 1594. What's interesting about the maze is that it was designed as a walk. Amsterdam had five gardens of the kind, and Herkenrode had a labyrinth in its pleasure garden too, minus the ticket booth.

The industrial version arrives in The Hague almost three hundred years later. Panorama Mesdag was commissioned during the panorama craze by a Belgian company, on the premise that a ticket buys you a quarter of an hour somewhere you aren't. An enormous circular canvas with no edges, and real sand in the middle. It lost money.

There are theatres and cinemas as well, of course, where you also pay for entertainment. The difference is that there you sit still and watch, while this is about places the audience has to move through.

## The pattern

Herkenrode, Aachen, Varallo, the maze and Mesdag share three things: something people want to see, payment for access in some form, and somebody's decision about how visitors move. The three pull against each other. The visitor wants to linger, wander freely, and know what they're paying for. The place wants throughput, wants everyone on a route, and wants to show the goods only after the money.

Each one shows its compromise: the window at Herkenrode, the gallery at Aachen, the bars at Varallo. All of them a balance struck so both sides could live with it.

But what if there's a third party? In 1897 Leopold II has a Congolese village built at Tervuren for the world exhibition, bringing nearly two hundred and seventy people from Congo to populate it. Seven die that summer, and it was neither the first nor the last time. At Expo 58 there were still almost six hundred Congolese people behind a fence, in the year of the Atomium. My grandmother and my great-aunt both went to Expo 58. This is less than a lifetime ago.

Something to see, an admission, a route. The form isn't inherently bad; it's empty. It organises attention and movement, and it will do that for any purpose you point it at.

## Scattered

The reason the form keeps being reinvented instead of handed on is that these places never met. Herkenrode was dissolved in 1796 and its contents scattered across Europe. A textile factory moved into the church and later burned down. The maze was flattened in 1862 when the city bought the land for a school. Of the three hundred or so panoramas painted, a handful survive, and Mesdag is the only one still in its original building. No trade existed to keep the knowledge: the abbey, the inn and the panorama company were never one industry. Face the same problem of a sight and an audience a century later, and you started from scratch. That the wheel came out the same shape each time says the problem never changed.

In Kaatsheuvel in 1952 the council wants to give the village a purpose. An illustrator of fairy tale books and a filmmaker build the Sprookjesbos, which draws more than 200,000 visitors that year at eighty cents a head. Disneyland doesn't exist yet. Age isn't the only thing that makes the Efteling interesting, though. What I find interesting is that it was never laid down in one go. Over seventy years it evolved with the conventions of each period, the grounds serving as its memory. Tivoli in Copenhagen has been doing the same since 1843.

After that the story gets duller. Standard ideas arrive, standard solutions, suppliers who'll reinvent the wheel on your behalf. That history has been told often enough elsewhere. But next time you're at the Efteling, stop by the museum and look at the old map on the wall. You can watch the park grow piece by piece, and see ideas taking shape.