In my father's footsteps
My grandfather was a baker, his father was a baker and his grandfather was a baker too. They ran a popular bakery in Zwijndrecht, a small town just south of Rotterdam. Unfortunately I never knew my grandfather and his bakery. The good man died and his bakery was demolished shortly before I was born. Based on old photos and drawings I have brought the bakery back to life in H0 (2003) and in O scale (2014).
The original drawings of the bakery do not exist anymore and did maybe never exist. It was not unusual to build houses without any drawings in the 19th century. Building permits were obviously not a problem in those days. The archive of Zwijndrecht did have some drawings of modifications to the building from a later date. These drawings only depicted a small portion of the building, but starting from these and working with old photographs, I made new drawings of the entire building.
The cross-section, the front and back the of the building. The bakery is quite narrow in comparison to its length of about 27 meters. The front had originally two smaller windows, but these were replaced by a big window in the 1930’s.
The two sides. The bakery was build against another house and that is why one side has no windows at all. The other side was accessible via a blind alley that was also used for the delivery of goods. The side shows the windows and doors of the living section and the bakery itself. Going from front to back, you will see the shop, the living room, the kitchen and the bakery. The big rectangular windows provided the necessary light in the workplace.
And that is what the entire diorama looks like. The streets were made from Noch wall imitation plates. I painted the plates in a colour I mixed to resemble a real stone from the road next to my house. Later I painted several stones in slightly different colours to make the street look like it has been broken up and redone time after time. The entire diorama was extensively weathered with pastels and that adds greatly to its realistic atmosphere.
2003, 2014
