History
Rotterdam, the city that rebuilt itself out of spite
German bombs flattened Rotterdam's medieval centre in a single afternoon in 1940. Rather than replace what was lost, the city decided to build something almost nothing like it, and has kept doing so ever since.
By Arthur Penhallow26 September 20264 min read
On the 14th of May 1940, German bombers destroyed the historic heart of Rotterdam in a raid that lasted under twenty minutes. The attack came after the city had already effectively surrendered and negotiations for a ceasefire were under way, a fact that has made the bombing one of the more contested episodes of the opening months of the Second World War: German commanders maintained the order to call off the raid arrived too late to reach all the aircraft involved, while the scale and timing of the destruction has long struck historians as disproportionate to any remaining military objective. Whatever the intent, the result was total: roughly a thousand buildings across the medieval city centre were destroyed, tens of thousands of people were made homeless, and the bombing was followed within hours by an ultimatum threatening the same treatment for other Dutch cities unless the country surrendered, which it did the following day.
A blank slate the city chose not to fill with a copy
Where many bombed European cities spent the postwar decades reconstructing their historic centres as closely as records and memory allowed, Rotterdam took a different, more contested path. Wartime and postwar planners decided early that the flattened centre would not be rebuilt as a replica of what had stood there, but reimagined as a modern city, wide boulevards in place of narrow medieval streets, and new architecture rather than reconstructed gables. The decision was not universally popular even at the time, and Rotterdam has spent the eight decades since fielding a version of the same argument other rebuilt cities avoid entirely by choosing to replicate the past instead of replace it.
The city has spent eight decades fielding the argument other rebuilt cities avoid by choosing to replicate the past instead of replace it.
A skyline that kept the experiment going
What Rotterdam actually built with that decision is a working answer to the argument. The Cube Houses, a cluster of yellow, tilted cubic homes completed in 1984 and designed by the architect Piet Blom to represent an abstract forest, tilted on their corners like trees leaning in a wind, remain one of the odder pieces of postwar Dutch housing anywhere in the country, and several are open to visitors as a working demonstration of how strangely liveable a tilted cube can actually be. The Erasmus Bridge, opened in 1996 and known locally as the Swan for the single asymmetric pylon that carries its cables, reconnected the city's two riverbanks with a piece of engineering deliberately designed to be looked at rather than merely crossed, and the Markthal, a market hall completed in 2014 in the shape of a vast arched tunnel with an enormous painted ceiling of fruit and flowers above the stalls, is a more recent example of the same instinct: build something nobody has quite built before, rather than something safely familiar.
The old city that survived, just outside the blast
Not everything historic in Rotterdam was lost. Delfshaven, the small harbour district from which the Pilgrim Fathers are recorded as having sailed for England in 1620 on the first leg of the journey that eventually took them to America aboard the Mayflower, sits slightly outside the area the 1940 bombing destroyed, and its canal-side warehouses and gabled houses survive largely intact, offering a glimpse of what the rest of the city centre once looked like before it was rebuilt around them.
Calling at Rotterdam
Rotterdam's harbour, one of the largest in Europe, sits within easy reach of several short Dutch and Belgian sailings from British ports. Holiday Magic: Rotterdam, Amsterdam & Bruges, four nights from London Tilbury, is built specifically to combine Rotterdam's modern skyline with Amsterdam's older one and a call at Bruges.
Dutch & Belgian Delights in Five Nights follows a similar route with an extra day at sea, while Discover Holland & Belgium's Festive Delights adds Rotterdam to a winter itinerary timed for the region's Christmas markets.
A day is enough to see the contrast the city is built around: the Cube Houses and the Erasmus Bridge on one side of a short walk, and the surviving gabled streets of Delfshaven on the other, close enough together that the argument about which approach was right never has to end.
By Arthur Penhallow, the name Atlas & Passage’s editorial team writes under. Prices and dates in the trips below come from the operators and can change.