De Badcuyp was originally a public bathhouse, since many residents didn't have a shower at home.
An artist-in-residence will transform an abandoned public bathhouse, and a former brewery-cum-barracks, Svetovar, is being turned into a major cultural centre.
It is precisely this which successive Israeli governments and Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have been doing for decades.PATRICK WRIGHTLondonBath controlSIR The Japanese bathhouse owner who balked at admitting a recently naturalised foreigner ("Bathroom blues", February 10th) is in company that is easily recognisable.
It is perhaps as a sop to religious conservatives, for instance, that Egyptian authorities have mounted an increasingly lurid campaign against homosexuality, most recently by staging a midnight raid on a Cairo bathhouse on national television, dragging a score of naked men to prison.
It is widely believed that security police filmed Seidakhmet Kuttykadam, an opposition politician, while he was in a public bathhouse with a woman who was not his wife, in order to compromise him.
But the Japanese bathhouse owner on the rural island of Hokkaido is surely atypical.
During a visit to Moscow's luxurious Sandunovsky bathhouse she spots a fellow-bather reading Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West"; another is applying a home-made unguent consisting of cream and coffee grounds.
His Joe Sixsmith, a short balding, black and impoverished private investigator operating in Luton, has "the gift of the truly innocent of stumbling into situations which, like a bishop in a bathhouse, required some explanation".
During the army's 17-day reoccupation of Nablus, the city's oldest mosque was gutted, soap factories destroyed and an ancient bathhouse ransacked.
Attention is already shifting: in the latest twist, the judge in the case was removed last week, after he acknowledged visiting a homosexual bathhouse.
The Romans were perhaps the first to develop flat glass for use as windows: a bathhouse window of greenish blue colour, most likely obtained by casting, was discovered in the ruins of Pompeii.
