Sex, drugs and an EU summit

Date: 28/03/1996

Indignant residents of Amsterdam who believe the free spirit of the city is being eroded by clean-up mayor Schelto Patijn can blame the EU.

As soon as it was announced that the city had been selected to host the Dutch Euro-summit in June 1997, incidentally denying Maastricht a hat trick, it was destined for a shake-up.

You simply cannot have heads of state and government going walkabout and peering into shop windows to find unmentionable people - or artefacts - peering back at them. Nor can you run the risk of them being offered a joint by some unofficial welcoming party. So work is under way to tidy things up a bit, in just the way that all summit venues get a dusting down - in Corfu, the refurbishments included new roads and telephones. The fact that the summiteers are more likely to read about the improvements than experience them is neither here nor there.

The summit centre has already been chosen. After losing out to Frankfurt in the battle to play host to the European Central Bank, the Netherlands has decided to accommodate summit leaders in the Dutch central bank.