Zeeland Industrial Museum

History

Right from the entrance, the monumental brick building holds a surprise. Visitors are invited to hang their coats and jackets onto baskets and pull them up to the ceiling using chains – just like the factory workers in the former coke factory in Sluiskil, where this ‘wardrobe’ comes from. The rest of the tour inside the spacious storage halls of the former sugar factory turns out to be a journey delving into the industrial heritage of a region that, in many places, does not appear to have been industrialised at all. The museum's appeal comes from its interactive approach, but also from the many small, often surprising stories it tells. Take the Bison-Kit company as an example: its founder, a shoe retailer from Goes, experimented so successfully with adhesives for shoe soles that a global corporation emerged from it, which today produces and sells adhesives in 65 countries around the world and supplied the mounting putty that helps ‘holding together’ the world's tallest building, the 818-metre-high Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

The industrialisation behind success stories like this first took shape after Belgium seceded from the Netherlands in 1830. Since then, heavy industry began to flourish in a country previously dominated by agriculture, small-scale industry and trade. This boom was mainly due to Belgian investors and the modernisation of the Ghent–Terneuzen canal in 1827. Sas van Gent, sitting just north of Ghent on the banks of the canal, rose to become one of the first industrial cities in the Netherlands. The museum reflects this development in interactive thematic areas on issues such as safety, energy and logistics. Large-scale attractions such as a former steam-powered generator or the head of a wind turbine stand alongside a mechanical time clock from the 19th century, used by the workers of the sugar factory to clock out. However, the museum also addresses the issue of industrial environmental damage and ways to prevent it in the future.