Westergasfabriek
The first thing that catches you is the scale: nineteen brick industrial buildings standing almost exactly as they did when Amsterdam's gas company shut them down in 1967, their Dutch Neo-Renaissance facades reflected in the canal alongside. Westergasfabriek — now going simply by Westergas — spent decades as a contaminated liability before squatters, artists, and eventually a serious remediation effort turned it into something harder to categorise than a park or a venue.
On any given Sunday you might find a market filling the main grass field, a concert warming up inside the cylindrical Gashouder, and children at the long paddling pool out back. The site runs to four hectares and the buildings are all in active use — theatre, restaurants, galleries, event spaces — without any of them having been dramatically reskinned.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return regularly tend to arrive via the Westergas Bridge rather than the main entrance — the 1919 iron crossing over the Haarlemmer trekvaart gives you the whole complex at once. They also check the Gashouder programme before visiting; the acoustics inside that 100,000 m³ cylinder are unlike any other room in the city.
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Book directly at the providerHow Westergasfabriek came to be
On 23 July 1883, Amsterdam granted a concession to the London Imperial Continental Gas Association to build a coal-gas plant on a strip of land between the Haarlemmer trekvaart and the city's first railway line. Austrian engineer Julius Pazzani led the technical work; architect Isaac Gosschalk — one of the most influential Dutch architects of the late nineteenth century — designed the buildings in Dutch Neo-Renaissance style. The plant opened in 1885 as the largest gas extraction facility in the Netherlands, supplying the city's street lamps.
Amsterdam bought the operation in 1898 and expanded steadily: the large Gashouder in 1902, the 100,000 m³ gas holder in 1903, a watergas plant in 1904. Production stopped in 1967, and the soil was found to be laced with cyanide and other toxic residues. Youth squatters moved in during the 1980s and arguably saved the buildings from demolition; the city formalised temporary creative leases in 1992. American landscape architect Kathryn Gustafson redesigned the 13.5-hectare site, and in 2003 it reopened as Culture Park Westergasfabriek, renamed Westergas in 2018.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Amsterdam weather shifts without much warning at any time of year, so a layer you can shed or add is worth carrying. The site's open-air events field is best from late spring through early autumn; winter markets happen but the wind off the canal is sharp.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.