Some local residents have serious nuisance from the Tilburg Railway Park: “They are urinating against my wall and throwing up against the garage. It’s like living in a ghetto.” Manager of the Spoorpark Sophie Peters finds it really annoying for these residents: “But the park is there, I think that’s a matter of accepting it.”
In a garden of one of the terraced houses directly adjacent to the Spoorpark, we speak with eight local residents. They live in both the terraced houses and the Poplar flat. They don’t know each other well.
Afraid of negative reactions, they only want to tell their story anonymously. “I was even threatened on Facebook because I gave my opinion,” says one of them. That is why the names in this story are made up.
“Isn’t it strange that you have to hope that your car is still intact afterwards?”
They are especially affected by events. There were thousands of students in the Spoorpark during the end-of-year cantus in June, during which students sang goodbye to the exams. Anouk: “We were protecting our car afterwards. They were puking and peeing between the cars. It really got out of hand. That’s weird isn’t it? That as residents you just have to hope that your car is still intact after such an event? My car has a scratch and a dent.”
Flat resident Douwe: “We were sitting on the gallery having a nice chat with the neighbours, when suddenly a guy like that walks up and opens his fly, hangs it out and pisses in the bushes. Recently a woman, also next to the bushes, throws her skirt up and let it run quietly. You don’t do that, do you?”
Anouk: “Wild defecating, haven’t we ever had one?”
Corry: “With toilet paper and everything else. Or you open your door and you can see exactly what they ate in the vomit. Egg salad, it smells so good. Can you go again with your buckets of chlorine.”
Anouk lives next to the city campsite in the park: “There is a lot of loud music there, they throw their leftovers from the barbecue, the chicken drumsticks, over the fence. That will rot and that means there are a lot of flies.”
Ben: “You have the smell of coal stoves, wood stoves, the barbecue: everything enters our house.”
Douwe: “The campsite had a silent disco, until late at night. They call it quiet. What, screaming and singing along to music, that was it. I went down, but was just laughed at when I said something about it.”
Apartment resident Alice: “When the campsite closes at eleven o’clock, it really just starts. Then the cars come, with young people, with loud music. The junkies, the dealers: it’s all here in front of the flat. It drives you crazy, really.”
“After peeing and vomiting, we cleaned the garage boxes.”
Manager of the Spoorpark Sophie Peters says she takes complaints from the neighborhood seriously: “We consider local residents to be of paramount importance. Every quarter we organize the Spoorparkcafé and there is a lot of room for comments and complaints.”
Where possible, the park tries to help, says Peters: “We have cleaned the garage boxes after reports of urinating and vomiting. But we also have to learn, we learn every time.”
But according to Corry, no response is given to complaints: “They cannot be reached. I send a Whatsapp and am told they are there for safety in the park and not outside. In other words: there are four thousand people in the park, afterwards we let them go and the neighborhood has to see what they do with it.”
“It’s not like we’re running away from our responsibilities,” Peters responds. “But we cannot influence people’s behaviour. Of course we want park visitors to go home in a decent way, but we cannot take responsibility for everyone.”
How many people are inconvenienced? We’re talking about eight now. But Anouk thinks there are more but that many people don’t dare say anything. According to Peters, the number of local residents who complain about serious nuisance from the Spoorpark is actually a small minority: “I think that many local residents mainly see the advantages and take the disadvantages for granted.”
If not Corry: “I want to get out of here,” she says. And she points to her husband: “Whether he goes or not. I don’t want to live here like this, I can’t stand this.”
Blood spatter against a garage box near the Spoorpark. A visitor to the Spoorpark emptied their bladder against a house nearby.
2023-07-12 13:51:31
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