Episode 03 The Canals Of Amsterdam

The canals ARE Amsterdam and Amsterdam IS its canals. They were awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site status as ‘a masterpiece of hydraulic engineering and town-planning’, so yes, part of it is about admiring their sheet ingenuity. And then there’s their beauty, different in every season, their autumnal charm summed up by Albert Camus like this: ‘I like the breath of stagnant waters, the smell of dead leaves soaking in the canal, and the funeral scent rising from the barges loaded with flowers.’ And who was it who wrote that ‘Snow turns Amsterdam’s canals onto etchings by a genius greater than Rembrandt’?

This episode runs through a little history and suggests 4 places to visit to understand more about the canals of Amsterdam. As ever, there is much more detail on the podcast.

a little history at the canal museum

Amsterdam Canal Museum Canals of Amsterdam Canal Museum Amsterdam

A visit to the Canal Museum at 386 Herengracht will leave you understanding how the miracle of Amsterdam’s canal network came into being. The multi-media presentation – English headsets available – which takes less than an hour begins with artists’ impressions of Amsterdam at the end of the 16th century. Refugees are flooding in, seeking religious tolerance and while this brings prosperity it also means there’s an acute housing shortage. You are invited to the council meeting in February 1610 where plans were made to dig out new canals in a loop shape, then to a further meeting 9 years later when the project is proving a success and attracting lots of investment.

From a meeting in 1662 you discover that the canal ring has been extended, warehouses have sprung up and so have stately canal-side mansions for the newly prosperous businessmen. Two big churches have been built – the Westerkerk and the Noorderkerk – and there are thriving marketplaces. Plans are in place to pave the streets connecting the canals and to install street lighting. Many factories are concentrated in the Jordaan area in the northwest of the city.

Canals of Amsterdam Canal Museum Amsterdam

In the next room, you are watching the Herengracht being dug out to a depth of 5 metres after the water has been pumped away. The sides will be secured with wooden piles, quay walls built, the water pumped back in and the soil extracted used to build on. For every house some 90 wooden piles will need to be driven into the ground, some as far as 20 metres down and it takes 30-40 men using a 400-kilo pile hammer to do it. They are pine logs, imported from Scandinavia, and all need to be kept submerged to prevent them rotting. Oak planks will be laid across the top to provide a platform to build on.

The centrepiece in the penultimate room Is a large model house from the 17th century. Walk round it and peer through every window to see the rooms. Being a double-fronted house, it had wealthy owners and you can see the expensive imported goods used to decorate their home: Persian silk, Turkish carpets, Venetian mirrors and, commissioned from local artists, a selection of paintings. The chamber pots are there too, together with an explanation that when full they will be emptied from the windows straight into the canal. Around the room are silhouette pictures of many more Amsterdam houses and in the final room, pictures show Amsterdam in 1663 with its tree-lined canals, many new buildings and prosperous streets.

houses along the canals of amsterdam

There’s a certain unity between the mansions on the so-called Golden Bend, roughly numbers 400-500 on the Herengracht, and the 17th century cottages in the Jordaan area. Amsterdam houses are tall and narrow, because they were originally taxed according to their width, although rich merchants sometimes built a double-fronted property. There are often steps leading up to the front door in case of flooding. Behind the house there is sometimes a ‘back house’, like the one where the Frank family lived in secret during World War II and a long, narrow garden. Look out for hooks on the front of the building, put there so that objects too large for the narrow staircases could be hoisted up the façade.

The facade may tilt slightly, either forwards, to make it easier to move goods up it, or sideways if the piles on which the house stands are beginning to rot. Gables are a dominant feature, built to decorate the top of the house which slopes steeply so that rain will run down it. The simplest are shaped like upside-down funnels, but others are ‘step gables’, designed like a pair of mini staircases, or ‘neck gables’, tall, elegant rectangular shapes rising like a neck from a body. The most beautiful might be the ‘bell gables’, often seen on the biggest houses.

2 canal house museums

Amsterdam Willet Holthuysen Museum Garden

The Van Loon Museum on Keizersgracht is a traditional canal-side house, built in 1672 and first owned by Ferdinand Bol, one of Rembrandt’s pupils. It was then bought by the Van Loon family, some of whom were city mayors or wealthy businessmen in the Dutch East India Company and it is still owned by family members today. It is still laid out and decorated in 17th century style, with a basement kitchen, reception rooms and bedrooms on the upper floors, then servants’ quarters and an attic. You can admire the beautifully furnished interior and the garden, laid out in the formal style preferred by the early owners and containing a coach house.

The Willet-Holthuysen Museum on Herengracht is a 17th century house, built originally for Jacob Hop, mayor of Amsterdam. Its last owners, the wealthy Louisa Holthuysen and her husband Abraham Willet, bequeathed it and their various collections – art, books, porcelain and glass – to the city of Amsterdam with the proviso that it should be opened as a museum. Three floors are open to the public, allowing you to see inside a ‘typical’ Golden Age mansion, albeit one which was decorated in extravagant Louis XVI style by its last residents.

the houseboat museum

Originally houseboats, usually converted freight ships, were a cheap way to create extra, much-needed housing in Amsterdam’s city centre. Today it is no longer an inexpensive option and they can cost up to 10,000 Euros per square metre. These days, they may be custom-made, but the original versions, with their wooden interiors and porthole windows had nautical charm and a good way to learn what they were like is to visit the Houseboat Museum, moored opposite 296 Prinsengracht.

The Houseboat Museum is a former cargo ship, the Hendrika Maria, built in 1914 and used to transport timber, sand and gravel until the 1960s when it became a painter’s studio, then a houseboat. You can see pictures telling its story and tour the surprisingly roomy accommodation which still has its 1970s décor with garish wallpaper and bright orange fixtures and fittings including the old-fashioned phone and the plastic orange tv set. Above deck there’s a pretty little garden. You’ll leave understanding much more about this very Amsterdam way of living.