Zaanhof
Why is it significant?
Step through the gateway and the noise of the city drops away. You are standing in a broad green courtyard ringed by low houses with steep roofs, like a village square that someone has carefully lifted and set down inside a city block.
Key Facts
| Place | Zaanhof |
|---|---|
| Address | Zaanhof, 1013 Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.39210, 4.87240 |
| Part of Walk | Red Brick Dreams: Amsterdam School, Het Schip & the Western Islands |
| Generated | Generated |
Step through the gateway and the noise of the city drops away. You are standing in a broad green courtyard ringed by low houses with steep roofs, like a village square that someone has carefully lifted and set down inside a city block.
The Zaanhof was built around the end of the First World War, at almost the same moment as Het Schip, just a few steps away. Yet it speaks a completely different language. Where de Klerk's walls ripple and shout, these houses are calm, symmetrical and almost rural. Two ideas of the good life for working people, built side by side: the expressive city of brick, and the garden village where children play safely on the grass inside the walls.
The garden village idea came from England, from reformers who believed that light, air and a bit of green could cure the misery of industrial cities. In Amsterdam land was too precious for real garden suburbs, so architects did the next best thing. They turned the block inside out, put the village in the middle and let the outer walls keep the street at bay.
Notice the street names on your way in and out: Zaanstraat, Oostzaanstraat, Zaandammerplein, Wormerveerstraat, Assendelftstraat, Knollendamstraat. Almost every street in this quarter is named after a town or village along the river Zaan, just north of Amsterdam. In the seventeenth century that was one of the busiest industrial landscapes in Europe, with hundreds of windmills sawing timber and grinding everything from mustard to paint. It was in Zaandam, in 1697, that the young Russian tsar Peter the Great came to learn shipbuilding in person, working with the carpenters.
Sit on a bench for a moment and you will understand why people who grow up here rarely want to leave. Then go back out through the gate and walk east along Zaandammerplein to Spaarndammerstraat, the old spine of the whole neighbourhood.