An Urban Palimpsest: Migrancy, Architecture, and the Making of an Anglo-Dutch Royal Exchange

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of London's commercial marketplace (the Royal Exchange) and civic pageantry to reveal how the Dutch stranger community in early modern London mobilized the poetic geography of the city's commercial landscape in order to represent their civic belongingness. Like the Dutch residents who were of London but not from London, monuments could also be doubly situated. London's Royal Exchange, a copy of Antwerp's Nieuwe Beurs, was designed by a Flemish architect and built by Dutch artisans in 1565. Initially coined 'Gresham's Burse' after the English merchant who funded the project, the Royal Exchange was transformed into an English denizen when Queen Elizabeth renamed it during her visit in 1571. Through their participation in a London pageant performed outside the Exchange, the Dutch strategically mobilized the site's double history (once Dutch, now denizen), revitalizing the doppelgänger effect that had long adhered to London's commercial centre. Through their performance at the Exchange during King James's royal progress in 1604, they link the building's naturalization to their own enfranchisement as Dutch denizens. In so doing, they situate themselves as a group of people built into — and partly responsible for building — the economic, social and material fabric of early modern London life. I argue that these intersections of architecture, Dutch migrancy, and London civic pageantry created a palimpsestic perception of London's urban landscape, one that reveals the overlapping of English and Dutch material culture as well as English and Dutch cultural identity.