Broese Bookshop

This bookshop was already selling books when the Netherlands had no king.

In 1753 the printer Dirk Kemink set up in Utrecht. Almost a century later, on the twenty-sixth of May 1843, Jacobus Gerardus Broese opened his own bookshop in the same city. The two businesses existed side by side for well over a hundred years, until they merged in 1972. The name Broese stayed.

The shop stood for a long time on the Oudegracht, opposite the Winkel van Sinkel. Now it sits behind the library, in the rear extension of the post office where this walk began.

That closes the circle, and not only on the map. You started at a building that has been a convent, a mint, a post office and a library, and you end in its extension at a bookshop two hundred and seventy years old. Nothing in this quarter still does what it was made for, and that is exactly why it is all still standing.