Bickerseiland

Why is it significant?

Walk along the Bickersgracht and look at the mix around you: old warehouses with hoist beams and shuttered loading doors, houseboats, and blocks of later housing that try, politely, to fit in. This is Bickerseiland, the last stop of the walk, and maybe the most unexpected.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk along the Bickersgracht and look at the mix around you: old warehouses with hoist beams and shuttered loading doors, houseboats, and blocks of later housing that try, politely, to fit in. This is Bickerseiland, the last stop of the walk, and maybe the most unexpected.

The island takes its name from Jan Bicker, a wealthy shipbuilder and merchant who bought it in 1631 and filled it with shipyards and warehouses. He belonged to one of the most powerful families in the Dutch Republic. His brothers sat in the city government, and his brother Andries Bicker was one of Amsterdam's burgomasters.

Now here is the delicious irony of the Western Islands. The island you have just crossed is Prinseneiland, the Island of the Princes, named after the House of Orange. And in 1650 the Bickers and the Prince of Orange were bitter enemies. The young stadtholder William the Second tried to bring the proud, independent city to heel and sent troops to march on Amsterdam. The Bickers were forced out of the city government. A few months later William died of smallpox, and Amsterdam went back to doing as it pleased. Today the Prince's island and the Bickers' island lie side by side, a short stroll apart.

In the twentieth century the shipyards closed, and parts of the island fell into ruin. When new housing came in the late twentieth century, it was deliberately kept low, and you can see the compromise all around you: modern homes with gables and brick that try not to outgrow the warehouses.

So think back over your walk. A neoclassical gate, a gasworks pretending to be a manor, de Klerk's rippling palaces for workers, a garden village, a tower on a bridge, a block of stacked containers, and now these quiet seventeenth-century quays. Every one of them is Amsterdam arguing with itself about how people should live. The Haarlemmerdijk and Central Station are a short walk to the south-east, and the argument goes on.