Pieterskerk Leiden: the church that lost its tower

Every big Dutch church has a tower. Leiden's does not have one, because the tower fell over in the night of 5 March 1512 — and the city decided to leave it that way. For five hundred years.

The Pieterskerk took about 180 years to build, starting in 1390, on a site that had held a chapel of the counts of Holland around 1100. It was Leiden's city church, dedicated to Saint Peter — hence the crossed keys on every coat of arms in this town, a symbol on the flag, on manhole covers, and carved into the Koornbrug. And until 1512 it had a tower: the Westtoren, nicknamed the "Coningh der Zee", the king of the sea, eventually about 110 metres with its wooden spire. Then that night in March it collapsed into rubble. The word came down: no time, no money. It stayed down. Today the towerless silhouette is the one thing everyone photographs wrong from the postcards' point of view — there is no tower to photograph.

Leiden's address book for the dead

Before 1811 the floor of the church was the city's cemetery, and the people it kept read like the town's greatest hits: Herman Boerhaave, the doctor who taught European medicine there in the nearby plague house. Jan Steen, of the beautiful chaos. The theologian Arminius. The botanist Rembert Dodoens. And John Robinson, the pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, whose congregation lived in Leiden for more than a decade before most of them sailed to America. The scientist Snellius is there too — the law of refraction is his.

Also gone: almost all the stained glass, not to iconoclasm but to a gunpowder ship explosion in the Rapenburg in January 1807. The walls stayed; the windows did not; boarded-up glass was the look for another seventy years. The explosion has its own stop on the dark-history walk.

The church today

The building was deconsecrated in 1971 and now runs as a foundation-run event space, open to the public, quiet and tall and mostly empty in the right way. Entry details and current opening times live on the church's own site, pieterskerk.com; small houses still cling to its sides, as they have since the idea of a church wall as real-estate backing became obvious to somebody in the seventeenth century.

Why the Pilgrims stayed here, and the whole list of who is under the flags, is in the walking book. Routes that pass it: the self-guided walking tour and the hidden gems guide.