A Dutch journalist follows those giving the “ugliest city in the Netherlands” a facelift.
On the northernmost stretch of the Dutch mainland, where the North Sea becomes the intertidal Wadden Sea, lies the city of Den Helder. Home to the Royal Dutch Navy, the maritime city has long been a strategic stronghold for the Dutch Crown, controlling the crossing to Texel, the first in the string of islands stretching all around the outer edge of the Netherlands and northern Germany, like fortresses demarcating land from sea.
In the Second World War, when the whole of the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis, Den Helder’s location made it a target for aerial bombing by both the British and Germans. But it didn’t stop there. “What wasn’t already flattened [from the air] was demolished by the Germans to open up their field of [artillery] fire towards the sea”, writes Kirsten Hannema in a piece about “de lelijkste stad van Nederland” (“the ugliest city in the Netherlands”) for the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant, with photographs by Loes van Duijvendijk.
Den Helder has undergone a series of less violent facelifts since. The first occurred shortly after Liberation, during a nationwide housing shortage. Quick and cheap, thousands of almost identical social homes were built almost overnight in the town centre.
But the local population didn’t increase as expected; in some areas it fell, as those who had the means moved to more spacious homes to the outskirts. (The city plan envisaged a population of 120,000 for central Den Helder, rather than the 56,000 who live there today). Public services became run down. The spiral continued with the 1993 relocation of the Royal Navy’s headquarters from the Willemsoord shipyard area to a location outside of Den Helder. A theme park project in the early 2000s didn’t work out.
Enter the Woningstichting Den Helder, the local public housing corporation (owner of thirty-seven percent of the local housing stock). Around the time the theme park failed, it moved its headquarters from a suburb to De Vijfsprong, a former girls’ school in the heart of town. “Our responsibilities go beyond maintaining homes,” says Ton Op ‘t Ende, a manager for the corporation: “if a neighbourhood isn’t attractive, people move away, and we have a problem.” Inside De Vijfsprong, Op ‘t Ende points to new terrazzo floors. “This has all been rebuilt”, he says: “there was nothing left of the interior from before.”
In 2007, the council took matters into its own hands, purchasing Willemsoord and commissioning the architectural firm West8 with reconfiguring downtown Den Helder. Urban planner Edzo Bindels recalls how downtown felt then: “undefined… a bit like Rotterdam’s Pendrecht”, in reference to a well-known district of Rotterdam built along utopian socialist lines in the 1950s – later reshaped through demolition. (Translator came across a good article about the history of Pendrecht, published here in NRC).
“The reconstruction-era architecture with its sleek facades and long canopies might have once had a certain grandeur about it”, Bindels tells Hannema, “but it looked worn”. Above all, because it never reached its planned population, the city felt perennially empty, rather than intimate, as it should.
A series of structural and stylistic interventions have changed the atmosphere. “We’ve brought back the spirit of the 1910s”, Bindels says. Outlying shopping streets have been made residential to refocus the city’s commercial centre on a smaller area. A local café owner points to new details on the façade of the De Kamerheer apartment complex: “this feeling was missing”.
It’s the same story all over: the dour naval city seems to have become a playground for architectural invention. One firm redecorated a standard yellow brick block of flats in the eccentric style of the Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Down the road, Ron van Leeuwen drew inspiration from Antoni Gaudi’s Casa Milà in Barcelona to adorn a 1970’s building – “monotonous flats, and certainly not beautiful” – with Art Nouveau style balconies, 3-D printed in concrete. “When you sit here in the sun with a glass of wine and look towards the dunes, you feel like you’re abroad”, say two residents. (Don’t get too carried away: when one of Translator’s editors passed through Den Helder in the depths of winter 2021, there was snow on the beach). Their balcony now houses a vegetable patch, a sandbox for their grandchildren, and a dining table.
Some projects, such as the new town hall, faced initial scepticism. Locals were worried that heritage elements – the names of workers inscribed on the wood of a former mast shed used as the shell for the town hall – might be removed. In the end, they were incorporated. In another project, scepticism was overcome by looking at century-old photographs to explore how the original look and feel of the buildings could be restored: cutting out plastic and laminate to get back to the bricks. The greatest success has been the School 7 library, radically reconfiguring an old school building from 1905. In 2018, it won an international prize as the best new library of the year.
Den Helder has had to navigate the challenging economics and politics of regeneration: a finished square metre here costs €2,308 against €7,500 in Amsterdam, but the building costs are the same. The local public housing corporation was involved in several landmark buildings which would not have been built by commercial developers. In 2015, a national law limited such corporations to building housing. So, it spun off a private development company to continue the job.
That work continues. The Molenwerf project is due to open next month. There are plans for a new residential area along a re-remodelled dike. “The trick”, Op ‘t Ende says, “is to complete this plan”, pointing to a map on his office wall.
For the moment, it looks like Den Helder is coming back.
Full original article, by Kirsten Hannema, ‘De lelijkste stad van Nederland moest weer stralen. Hoe is dat gelukt?’, was first published in Dutch on 26 February 2025 and is available here.
Kirsten Hannema is an architectural critic in the Netherlands.
Loes van Duijvendijk is an architectural photographer.
De Volkskrant is a daily newspaper based in Amsterdam.
