Marineterrein: The Admiralty's Hidden Yard
Why is it significant?
Walk through the gate and notice how the city changes in a few steps. Long brick sheds, old naval buildings, a quiet harbour basin, and on warm days people swimming off the quay... in the middle of Amsterdam, on ground that most citizens were not allowed to enter for more than three hundred years.
Key Facts
| Place | Marineterrein: The Admiralty's Hidden Yard |
|---|---|
| Address | Kattenburgerstraat 5, 1018 JA Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.37390, 4.91480 |
| Part of Walk | Spice, Ships and Shadows: Amsterdam's Golden Age Harbour and the Dutch East India Company |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk through the gate and notice how the city changes in a few steps. Long brick sheds, old naval buildings, a quiet harbour basin, and on warm days people swimming off the quay... in the middle of Amsterdam, on ground that most citizens were not allowed to enter for more than three hundred years.
This is the Marineterrein, the navy yard. In the 1650s Amsterdam created three new artificial islands east of the old city, Kattenburg, Wittenburg and Oostenburg, and handed them over to the sea. Kattenburg went to the Admiralty of Amsterdam, one of the five admiralties that ran the navy of the Dutch Republic. Here, behind high walls, its carpenters built and repaired the warships that protected the merchant convoys.
Think of the scale of it. A big warship of the Golden Age swallowed thousands of oak trees, kilometres of rope, acres of sail and dozens of cannon. Wood came floating down the Rhine from Germany, hemp and tar arrived from the Baltic, and the whole Golden Age economy fed into these slipways. The VOC had its own fleet, but in wartime its convoys relied on the warships that were built and fitted out on yards like this one.
The yard stayed military long after the Golden Age. After the Republic fell in 1795 the old admiralties were swept away and it became a state naval yard, and through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Dutch navy kept a base here, a closed world in the middle of the capital. Most Amsterdammers only knew it as a long blank wall along the Kattenburgerstraat.
Then, from 2015, the gates began to open. The navy is gradually leaving, and the old yard is turning into a neighbourhood of workshops, start-ups and open quays, where in summer people swim in the basin where warships once lay. Now walk out of the yard and along the water to the great square building next door, where the Admiralty kept everything its ships needed.