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that had dominated the nineteenth century, whose prime practitioner had been Cuypers (see "Centraal Station and Stationsplein"). Instead he opted for a style with cleaner, heavier lines, inspired by the Romanesque and the Renaissance, but with the minimum of ornamentation. In so doing, he anticipated the Expressionism that swept across northern Europe from 1905 to 1925. The Beurs has long since lost its commercial function and nowadays hosts concerts and conferences, as well as exhibitions on modern art and design. The building is still the main event, from the graceful exposed ironwork and shallow-arched arcades of the main hall through to a fanciful frieze celebrating the stockbroker’s trade. Seeing a temporary exhibition is the only chance you’ll get to see inside, unless you visit the convivial Café Beurs van Berlage that fronts onto Beursplein around the corner. There you can have a coffee and admire the tiled scenes of the past, present and future by the twentieth-century Dutch artist Jan Toorop.

The Old Centre | Damrak and the Nieuwe Zijde |

De Bijenkorf

Just southwest of the Beurs, the enormous department store De Bijenkorf – literally “beehive” – extends south along the Damrak. De Bijenkorf posed all sorts of problems for the Germans when they first occupied the city in World War II. The store was a Jewish concern, so the Nazis didn’t really want their troops shopping here, but it was just too popular to implement a total ban. The bizarre solution was to prohibit German soldiers from shopping on the ground floor, where the store’s Jewish employees were concentrated, as they always had been, in the luxury goods section. These days it’s a good all-round department store, with the usual floors of designer-wear and well-known brands but none of the snootiness you usually associate with such places.

The Old Centre | Damrak and the Nieuwe Zijde |

The Crowne Plaza

Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal kicks off with the Crowne Plaza Hotel at no. 5, formerly the Holiday Inn, built on the site of an old tenement building called Wyers. The 1985 clearance of squatters from Wyers ranks among the more infamous of that decade’s anti-squatting campaigns, involving a great deal of protest (and some violence) throughout the city. The squatters had occupied the building in an attempt to prevent yet another slice of the city being converted from residential to business use. They were widely supported by the people of Amsterdam, but they couldn’t match the clout of the American hotel company and riot police were sent in; construction of the hotel followed soon after.

The Old Centre | Damrak and the Nieuwe Zijde |

The Lutherse Kerk

It’s a short walk from Nieuwezijds Voorbugwal along Hekelveld and down Kattengat to the Lutherse Kerk, a round, seventeenth-century edifice whose copper dome gives this area its nickname, Koepelkwartier (“Copper quarter”). Church domes are a rarity in Amsterdam, but this one was no stylistic peccadillo; until the late eighteenth century, only Dutch Reformed churches were permitted the (much more fashionable) bell towers, so the Lutherans got stuck with a dome. It’s a grand building, seen to best advantage from the Singel canal, but it has been dogged by bad luck; in 1882 the interior was gutted by fire and, although it was repaired, the cost of maintenance proved too high for the congregation, who decamped in 1935. After many years of neglect, the adjacent Renaissance Hotel bought the church, turning it into a conference centre.

The Old Centre | Damrak and the Nieuwe Zijde |

Nieuwezijds Kolk

Just off Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal is the open space of Nieuwezijds Kolk, where the angular, glassy and ultramodern ABN-Amro bank building on the corner is testament to the recent large-scale construction work that has transformed the area. When the underground car park was being dug here, workers discovered archeological remains dating back to the thirteenth century; these turned out to be the castle of the “Lords of Amstel”, which, it is thought, had occupied the site when it was open marshland, even before the Amstel was