That’s not a photograph. It’s a screenshot of today’s Binnenrotte Market in Rotterdam. It takes place every Tuesday and Saturday and it’s one of my favourite things in the city. I love to walk up and down the market, marvelling at the enormous cheese stalls, the smell of the fresh fruit and veg stalls, the various takeaways and, if you like it, good old fashioned tat.
The market itself has barely changed since I first went to Rotterdam in the 1960s. The area around it, in typical Rotterdam style, has changed enormously.
At the fore of the picture is Station Blaak, which is these days situated underground. When I was a train-mad kid, the railway was above ground, on what looked to me like enormous metal stilts and the local trains rumbled past all day. The woman in this photo could easily be my mum or Queen Elizabeth II, on an unlikely fruit and veg shop. Or maybe just for some pickled herring.
Watching the trains go by was my kind of heaven. The spoilsport Dutch decided more recently to demolish the old railway bridge over the River Maas, which is behind the top photo, and put the whole line underground from close to the Central Station to the other side of the river. Even without the railway, the market, with its 500 or so stalls, is a great place to spend time.
To the right are the bonkers cube houses, to the left the magnificent Markthal (Market Hall), full of eateries on the inside and apartments on the outside. There’s nowhere quite like it.
People usually think of Amsterdam when they go to the Netherlands, but because my family came from Rotterdam I obviously think of Rotterdam. The city was flattened by the Luftwaffe in World War Two but is now the very model of modernity. Yet despite the newness of the place, it still has a remarkable atmosphere.
New meets what’s left of old, which isn’t much to be fair, and it works.
Somewhere in the above picture, or close to it, was the apartment my mum and her family lived in, until 14th May 1940. They had been moved to a bomb shelter minutes before the Luftwaffe arrived. They lost everything. My grandfather was a humble carpenter and obviously all the tools for his trade were lost. They had the clothes they lived in, nothing else. When I paid a visit to Rotterdam last autumn, I went to an exhibition of WW2 history. Today’s Rotterdam is incredible.
Visiting in 2023 was not closure, as I thought it might be given that all my Dutch relatives are long dead. But it wasn’t. In fact, it reinvigorated my love of the Netherlands, reminding me of my Dutch heritage. All I want to do now is go back again and soon.
Since I don’t believe in any kind of spirit world, I’m unable to work out what keeps drawing me back and how it feels like home, even though I have never lived there. But somehow, I just feel that I am meant to be there, not because of any grand design. Rotterdam is a part of my very being.
Market day was one of my favourite days when we went there. Thanks to the internet, I can watch it twice a week. That feels like a miracle, even if there are no miracles in real life.
