Rijswijk

Rijswijk once stopped a world war — the seventeenth-century kind. In 1697 the powers of Europe gathered at the palace of Huis ter Nieuwburg in this village outside The Hague and signed the Treaty of Rijswijk, ending the Nine Years' War between Louis XIV and the Grand Alliance: for one autumn, the diplomatic capital of the continent was a Dutch country house among orchards. The palace is gone — a needle-shaped memorial obelisk stands in its park — but the town keeps the habit of hosting consequence: today Rijswijk, grown into The Hague's urban fabric, houses European institutions of the patent world and the offices of an international city, its old village core of church and manor lanes surviving amid the agglomeration.

That core — the fifteenth-century Old Church, the Tollensstraat's village scale, the museum in a former mansion known for its paper-art biennale — gives Rijswijk an identity the tower blocks around it respect. The concert record's register describes the musical life honestly: concerts, choirs, church music and community celebrations, with the town's theatre carrying the touring circuit for local audiences who can also stroll to The Hague's halls. A treaty in an orchard, patents in the office park: Rijswijk has always been where larger neighbours come to settle things.